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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope,
+by Lord Bolingbroke, Edited by Henry Morley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope
+
+
+Author: Lord Bolingbroke
+
+Editor: Henry Morley
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2014  [eBook #5132]
+[This file was first posted on May 7, 2002]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM AND
+MR. POPE***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
+
+                        CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 LETTERS
+                                    TO
+                           SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM
+                                   AND
+                                 MR. POPE
+
+
+                                    BY
+                             LORD BOLINGBROKE
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                       CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
+                      _LONDON_, _PARIS & MELBOURNE_
+                                   1894
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+HENRY ST. JOHN, who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, was born on the
+1st of October, 1678, at the family manor of Battersea, then a country
+village.  His grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there with his wife
+Johanna,—daughter to Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St. John,—in one
+home with the child’s father, Henry St. John, who was married to the
+second daughter of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.  The child’s
+grandfather, a man of high character, lived to the age of eighty-seven;
+and his father, more a man of what is miscalled pleasure, to the age of
+ninety.  It was chiefly by his grandfather and grandmother that the
+education of young Henry St. John was cared for.  Simon Patrick,
+afterwards Bishop of Ely, was for some years a chaplain in their home.
+By his grandfather and grandmother the child’s religious education may
+have been too formally cared for.  A passage in Bolingbroke’s letter to
+Pope shows that he was required as a child to read works of a divine who
+“made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth
+Psalm.”
+
+After education at Eton and Christchurch, Henry St. John travelled
+abroad, and in the year 1700 he married, at the age of twenty-two,
+Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winchescomb, a Berkshire
+baronet.  She had much property, and more in prospect.
+
+In the year 1701, Henry St. John entered Parliament as member for Wotton
+Bassett, the family borough.  He acted with the Tories, and became
+intimate with their leader, Robert Harley.  He soon became distinguished
+as the ablest and most vigorous of the young supporters of the Tory
+party.  He was a handsome man and a brilliant speaker, delighted in by
+politicians who, according to his own image in the Letter to Windham,
+“grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game.”  He was active
+in the impeachment of Somers, Montague, the Duke of Portland, and the
+Earl of Oxford for their negotiation of the Partition Treaties.  In later
+years he said he had acted here in ignorance, and justified those
+treaties.
+
+James II. died at St. Germains, a pensioner of France, aged sixty-eight,
+on the 6th of September, 1701.
+
+His pretensions to the English throne passed to the son, who had been
+born on the 10th of June, 1688, and whose birth had hastened on the
+Revolution.  That son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who was only thirteen
+years old at his father’s death, is known sometimes in history as the Old
+Pretender; the Young Pretender being his son Charles Edward, whose defeat
+at Culloden in 1746 destroyed the last faint hope of a restoration of the
+Stuarts.  It is with the young heir to the pretensions of James II. that
+the story of the life of Bolingbroke becomes concerned.
+
+King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded by
+James II.’s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old, and had
+been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of Denmark.
+She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a much-troubled
+mother, who had lost five children in their infancy, besides one who
+survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the year 1700.  As his
+death left the succession to the Crown unsettled, an Act of Settlement,
+passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided that, in case of failure
+of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown should pass to the next
+Protestant in succession, who was Sophia, wife of the Elector of Hanover.
+The Electress Sophia was daughter of the Princess Elizabeth who had
+married the Elector Palatine in 1613, granddaughter, therefore, of James
+I.  She was more than seventy years old when Queen Anne began her reign.
+For ardent young Tories, who had no great interest in the limitation of
+authority or enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it was no treason to
+think, though it would be treason to say, that the old Electress and her
+more than forty-year-old German son George, gross-minded and clumsy, did
+not altogether shut out hope for the succession of a more direct heir to
+the Crown.
+
+In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of State,
+and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in under
+Marlborough and Godolphin, and St. John’s successor was his rival Robert
+Walpole.  St. John retired then for two year from public life to his
+country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which had come to him, through
+his wife, by the death of his wife’s father the year before.  He was
+thirty years old, the most brilliant of the rising statesmen; impatient
+of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as his younger rival from the other
+side, both of them men who, in his eyes, were dull and slow.  St. John’s
+quick intellect, though eager and impatient of successful rivalry, had
+its philosophic turn.  During these two years of retirement he indulged
+the calmer love of study and thought, whose genius he said once, in a
+letter to Lord Bathurst “On the True use of Retirement and Study,”
+“unlike the dream of Socrates, whispered so softly, that very often I
+heard him not, in the hurry of those passions by which I was transported.
+Some calmer hours there were; in them I hearkened to him.  Reflection had
+often its turn, and the love of study and the desire of knowledge have
+never quite abandoned me.”
+
+In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his
+ministry as Secretary of State.  “I am thinking,” wrote Swift to Stella,
+“what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple because he
+might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is a young fellow
+hardly thirty in that employment.”
+
+It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with France,
+that was against all their political interests.  The Whigs wished to
+maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of the Pretender.
+In the peace negotiations nobody was so active as Secretary St. John.  On
+one occasion, without consulting his colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of
+Ormond, who commanded the English army in the Netherlands: “Her Majesty,
+my lord, has reason to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the
+great article of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier
+sent from Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen’s
+positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege or
+hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty.  I am
+at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen would
+have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her Majesty thinks
+you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so as to answer her
+ends without owning that which might at present have an ill effect if
+publicly known.”  He added as a postscript: “I had almost forgot to tell
+your grace that communication is given of this order to the Court of
+France.”  The peace was right, but the way of making it was mean in more
+ways than one, and the friction between Harley and St. John steadily
+increased.  St. John used his majority in the House for the expulsion of
+his rival Walpole and Walpole’s imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of
+corruption.  In 1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of
+Oxford, St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke,
+in the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct.  His
+ill-will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank of
+Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of Commons,
+where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four, as Viscount
+Bolingbroke and Baron St. John.  His father’s congratulation on the
+peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism: “Well, Harry, I said you
+would be hanged, but now I see you’ll be beheaded.”
+
+The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish Succession, was
+signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713.  Queen Anne died on the
+1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe for the reaction that
+Bolingbroke had hoped to see.  His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us to
+understand that in Queen Anne’s reign the possible succession of James
+II.’s son, the Chevalier de St. George, had never been out of his mind.
+
+The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne.
+The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined.  He was
+dismissed from office before the end of the month.  On the 26th of March,
+1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French
+messenger La Vigne.  A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a
+few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was
+Walpole’s impeachment of Bolingbroke.  He was, in September, 1715, in
+default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased
+from the roll of peers.  His own account of his policy will be found in
+this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the only weak
+feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke’s resentment against Harley.
+
+When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few days in
+Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in Dauphiny.  His Letter
+to Windham tells how he became Secretary of State to the Pretender, and
+how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels.  The
+hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to
+delay until there might be some chance of success.  The death of Louis
+XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had removed the last prop of
+a falling cause.
+
+Some part of Bolingbroke’s forfeited property was returned to his wife,
+who pleaded in vain for the reversal of his attainder.  Bolingbroke was
+ill-used by the Pretender and abused by the Jacobites.  He had been
+writing philosophical “Reflections upon Exile,” but when he found himself
+thus attacked on both sides Bolingbroke resolved to cast Jacobitism to
+the winds, speak out like a man, and vindicate himself in a way that
+might possibly restore him to the service of his country.  So in April,
+1717, at the age of thirty-nine, he began work upon what is justly
+considered the best of his writings, his Letter to Sir William Windham.
+
+Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth, who
+had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been accepted by
+the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after Henry St. John had
+been sent to the House of Lords.  Windham was “Dear Willie” to
+Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was sent to the Tower as a
+Jacobite.  But he had powerful connections, was kindly and not dangerous,
+and was soon back in his place in the House fighting the Whigs.  The
+Letter to Windham was finished in the summer of 1717.  Its frankness was
+only suited to the prospect of a pardon.  It was found that there was no
+such prospect, and the Letter was not published until 1753, a year or two
+after its writer’s death.
+
+Bolingbroke’s first wife died in November, 1718.  He married in 1720 a
+Marquise de Villette, with whom he lived on an estate called La Source,
+near Orleans, at the source of the small river Loiret.  There he talked
+and wrote philosophy.  His pardon was obtained in May, 1723.  In 1725 he
+was allowed by Act of Parliament the possession of his family
+inheritance; but as the attainder was not reversed he could never again
+sit in Parliament.  So he came home in 1725, and bought an estate at
+Dawley, near Uxbridge.  There he philosophised in his own way and played
+at farming, discoursed with Pope and plied his pen against the Whigs.  In
+his letter to Pope, Bolingbroke writes of ministers of religion as if
+they had no other function than to maintain theological dogmas, and draws
+a false conclusion from false premisses.  He died on the 12th of
+December, 1751.
+
+                                                                      H.M.
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER
+TO
+SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM.
+
+
+I WAS well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind, and
+in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as much out
+of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had never lived and
+acted together.  I depended on being forgot by them, and was far from
+imagining it possible that I should be remembered only to be condemned
+loudly by one half of them, and to be tacitly censured by the greatest
+part of the other half.  As soon as I was separated from the Pretender
+and his interest, I declared myself to be so; and I gave directions for
+writing into England what I judged sufficient to put my friends on their
+guard against any surprise concerning an event which it was their
+interest, as well as mine, that they should be very rightly informed
+about.
+
+As soon as the Pretender’s adherents began to clamour against me in this
+country, and to disperse their scandal by circular letters everywhere
+else, I gave directions for writing into England again.  Their groundless
+articles of accusation were refuted, and enough was said to give my
+friends a general idea of what had happened to me, and at least to make
+them suspend the fixing any opinion till such time as I should be able to
+write more fully and plainly to them myself.  To condemn no person
+unheard is a rule of natural equity, which we see rarely violated in
+Turkey, or in the country where I am writing: that it would not be so
+with me in Great Britain, I confess that I flattered myself.  I dwelt
+securely in this confidence, and gave very little attention to any of
+those scurrilous methods which were taken about this time to blast my
+reputation.  The event of things has shown that I trusted too much to my
+own innocence, and to the justice of my old friends.
+
+It was obvious that the Chevalier and the Earl of Mar hoped to load me
+with the imputation of treachery, incapacity, or neglect: it was
+indifferent to them of which.  If they could ascribe to one of those
+their not being supported from France, they imagined that they should
+justify their precipitate flight from Scotland, which many of their
+fastest friends exclaimed against; and that they should varnish over that
+original capital fault, the drawing the Highlanders together in arms at
+the time and in the manner in which it was done.
+
+The Scotch, who fell at once from all the sanguine expectations with
+which they had been soothed, and who found themselves reduced to despair,
+were easy to be incensed; they had received no support whatever, and it
+was natural for them rather to believe that they failed of this support
+by my fault, than to imagine their general had prevailed on them to rise
+in the very point of time when it was impossible that they should be
+supported from France, or from any other part of the world.  The Duke of
+Ormond, who had been the bubble of his own popularity, was enough out of
+humour with the general turn of affairs to be easily set against any
+particular man.  The emissaries of this Court, whose commission was to
+amuse, had imposed upon him all along; and there were other busy people
+who thought to find their account in having him to themselves.  I had
+never been in his secret whilst we were in England together: and from his
+first coming into France he was either prevailed upon by others, or,
+which I rather believe, he concurred with others, to keep me out of it.
+The perfect indifference I showed whether I was in it or no, might carry
+him from acting separately, to act against me.
+
+The whole tribe of Irish and other papists were ready to seize the first
+opportunity of venting their spleen against a man, who had constantly
+avoided all intimacy with them; who acted in the same cause, but on a
+different principle, and who meant no one thing in the world less than
+raising them to the advantages which they expected.
+
+That these several persons, for the reasons I have mentioned, should join
+in a cry against me, is not very marvellous; the contrary would be so to
+a man who knows them as well as I do.  But that the English Tories should
+serve as echoes to them—nay more, that my character should continue
+doubtful at best amongst you, when those who first propagated the slander
+are become ashamed of railing without proof, and have dropped the
+clamour,—this I own that I never expected; and I may be allowed to say,
+that as it is an extreme surprise, so it shall be a lesson to me.
+
+The Whigs impeached and attainted me.  They went farther—at least, in my
+way of thinking, that step was more cruel than all the others—by a
+partial representation of facts, and pieces of facts, put together as it
+best suited their purpose, and published to the whole world, they did all
+that in them lay to expose me for a fool, and to brand me for a knave.
+But then I had deserved this abundantly at their hands, according to the
+notions of party-justice.  The Tories have not indeed impeached nor
+attainted me; but they have done, and are still doing something very like
+to that which I took worse of the Whigs than the impeachment and
+attainder: and this, after I have shown an inviolable attachment to the
+service, and almost an implicit obedience to the will of the party; when
+I am actually an outlaw, deprived of my honours, stripped of my fortune,
+and cut off from my family and my country, for their sakes.
+
+Some of the persons who have seen me here, and with whom I have had the
+pleasure to talk of you, may, perhaps, have told you that, far from being
+oppressed by that storm of misfortunes in which I have been tossed of
+late, I bear up against it with firmness enough, and even with alacrity.
+It is true, I do so; but it is true likewise that the last burst of the
+cloud has gone near to overwhelm me.  From our enemies we expect evil
+treatment of every sort, we are prepared for it, we are animated by it,
+and we sometimes triumph in it; but when our friends abandon us, when
+they wound us, and when they take, to do this, an occasion where we stand
+the most in need of their support, and have the best title to it, the
+firmest mind finds it hard to resist.
+
+Nothing kept up my spirits when I was first reduced to the very
+circumstances I now describe so much as the consideration of the
+delusions under which I knew that the Tories lay, and the hopes I
+entertained of being able soon to open their eyes, and to justify my
+conduct.  I expected that friendship, or, if that principle failed,
+curiosity at least, would move the party to send over some person from
+whose report they might have both sides of the question laid before them.
+Though this expectation be founded in reason, and you want to be informed
+at least as much as I do to be justified, yet I have hitherto flattered
+myself with it in vain.  To repair this misfortune, therefore, as far as
+lies in my power, I resolve to put into writing the sum of what I should
+have said in that case.  These papers shall lie by me till time and
+accidents produce some occasion of communicating them to you.  The true
+occasion of doing it with advantage to the party will probably be lost;
+but they will remain a monument of my justification to posterity.  At
+worst, if even this fails me, I am sure of one satisfaction in writing
+them: the satisfaction of unburdening my mind to a friend, and of stating
+before an equitable judge the account, as I apprehend it to stand,
+between the Tories and myself—“Quantum humano consilio efficere potui,
+circumspectis rebus meis omnibus, rationibusque subductis, summam feci
+cogitationum mearum omnium, quam tibi, si potero, breviter exponam.”
+
+It is necessary to my design that I call to your mind the state of
+affairs in Britain from the latter part of the year 1710 to the beginning
+of the year 1715, about which time we parted.  I go no farther back
+because the part which I acted before that time, in the first essays I
+made in public affairs, was the part of a Tory, and so far of a piece
+with that which I acted afterwards.  Besides, the things which preceded
+this space of time had no immediate influence on those which happened
+since that time, whereas the strange events which we have seen fall out
+in the king’s reign were owing in a great measure to what was done, or
+neglected to be done, in the last four years of the queen’s.  The memory
+of these events being fresh, I shall dwell as little as possible upon
+them; it will be sufficient that I make a rough sketch of the face of the
+Court, and of the conduct of the several parties during that time.  Your
+memory will soon furnish the colours which I shall omit to lay, and
+finish up the picture.
+
+From the time at which I left Britain I had not the advantage of acting
+under the eyes of the party which I served, nor of being able from time
+to time to appeal to their judgment.  The gross of what happened has
+appeared; but the particular steps which led to those events have been
+either concealed or misrepresented—concealed from the nature of them or
+misrepresented by those with whom I never agreed perfectly except in
+thinking that they and I were extremely unfit to continue embarked in the
+same bottom together.  It will, therefore, be proper to descend under
+this head to a more particular relation.
+
+In the summer of the year 1710 the Queen was prevailed upon to change her
+Parliament and her Ministry.  The intrigue of the Earl of Oxford might
+facilitate the means, the violent prosecution of Sacheverel, and other
+unpopular measures, might create the occasion and encourage her in the
+resolution; but the true original cause was the personal ill-usage which
+she received in her private life and in some trifling instances of the
+exercise of her power, for indulgence in which she would certainly have
+left the reins of government in those hands which had held them ever
+since her accession to the throne.
+
+I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties
+have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the
+government of the state in our hands; that our principal views were the
+conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great
+opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us, and of
+hurting those who stood in opposition to us.  It is, however, true that
+with these considerations of private and party interest there were others
+intermingled which had for their object the public good of the nation—at
+least what we took to be such.
+
+We looked on the political principles which had generally prevailed in
+our government from the Revolution in 1688 to be destructive of our true
+interest, to have mingled us too much in the affairs of the Continent, to
+tend to the impoverishing our people, and to the loosening the bands of
+our constitution in Church and State.  We supposed the Tory party to be
+the bulk of the landed interest, and to have no contrary influence
+blended into its composition.  We supposed the Whigs to be the remains of
+a party formed against the ill designs of the Court under King Charles
+II., nursed up into strength and applied to contrary uses by King William
+III., and yet still so weak as to lean for support on the Presbyterians
+and the other sectaries, on the Bank and the other corporations, on the
+Dutch and the other Allies.  From hence we judged it to follow that they
+had been forced, and must continue so, to render the national interest
+subservient to the interest of those who lent them an additional
+strength, without which they could never be the prevalent party.  The
+view, therefore, of those amongst us who thought in this manner was to
+improve the Queen’s favour, to break the body of the Whigs, to render
+their supports useless to them, and to fill the employments of the
+kingdom, down to the meanest, with Tories.  We imagined that such
+measures, joined to the advantages of our numbers and our property, would
+secure us against all attempts during her reign, and that we should soon
+become too considerable not to make our terms in all events which might
+happen afterwards: concerning which, to speak truly, I believe few or
+none of us had any very settled resolution.
+
+In order to bring these purposes about, I verily think that the
+persecution of Dissenters entered into no man’s head.  By the Bills for
+preventing Occasional Conformity and the growth of schism, it was hoped
+that their sting would be taken away.  These Bills were thought necessary
+for our party interest, and, besides, were deemed neither unreasonable
+nor unjust.  The good of society may require that no person should be
+deprived of the protection of the Government on account of his opinions
+in religious matters; but it does not follow from hence that men ought to
+be trusted in any degree with the preservation of the Establishment, who
+must, to be consistent with their principles, endeavour the subversion of
+what is established.  An indulgence to consciences, which the prejudice
+of education and long habits have rendered scrupulous, may be agreeable
+to the rules of good policy and of humanity, yet will it hardly follow
+from hence that a government is under any obligation to indulge a
+tenderness of conscience to come, or to connive at the propagating of
+these prejudices and at the forming of these habits.  The evil effect is
+without remedy, and may, therefore, deserve indulgence; but the evil
+cause is to be prevented, and can, therefore, be entitled to none.
+Besides this, the Bills I am speaking of, rather than to enact anything
+new, seemed only to enforce the observation of ancient laws which had
+been judged necessary for the security of the Church and State at a time
+when the memory of the ruin of both, and of the hands by which that ruin
+had been wrought, was fresh in the minds of men.
+
+The Bank, the East India Company, and in general the moneyed interest,
+had certainly nothing to apprehend like what they feared, or affected to
+fear, from the Tories—an entire subversion of their property.  Multitudes
+of our own party would have been wounded by such a blow.  The intention
+of those who were the warmest seemed to me to go no farther than
+restraining their influence on the Legislature, and on matters of State;
+and finding at a proper season means to make them contribute to the
+support and ease of a government under which they enjoyed advantages so
+much greater than the rest of their fellow-subjects.  The mischievous
+consequence which had been foreseen and foretold too, at the
+establishment of those corporations, appeared visibly.  The country
+gentlemen were vexed, put to great expenses and even baffled by them in
+their elections; and among the members of every parliament numbers were
+immediately or indirectly under their influence.  The Bank had been
+extravagant enough to pull off the mask; and, when the Queen seemed to
+intend a change in her ministry, they had deputed some of their members
+to represent against it.  But that which touched sensibly even those who
+were but little affected by other considerations, was the prodigious
+inequality between the condition of the moneyed men and of the rest of
+the nation.  The proprietor of the land, and the merchant who brought
+riches home by the returns of foreign trade, had during two wars borne
+the whole immense load of the national expenses; whilst the lender of
+money, who added nothing to the common stock, throve by the public
+calamity, and contributed not a mite to the public charge.
+
+As to the Allies, I saw no difference of opinion among all those who came
+to the head of affairs at this time.  Such of the Tories as were in the
+system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon after from us, and
+such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion deserted to us, seemed
+equally convinced of the unreasonableness, and even of the impossibility,
+of continuing the war on the same disproportionate footing.  Their
+universal sense was, that we had taken, except the part of the States
+General, the whole burden of the war upon us, and even a proportion of
+this; while the entire advantage was to accrue to others: that this had
+appeared very grossly in 1709, and 1710, when preliminaries were insisted
+upon, which contained all that the Allies, giving the greatest loose to
+their wishes, could desire, and little or nothing on the behalf of Great
+Britain: that the war, which had been begun for the security of the
+Allies, was continued for their grandeur: that the ends proposed, when we
+engaged in it, might have been answered long before, and therefore that
+the first favourable occasion ought to be seized of making peace; which
+we thought to be the interest of our country, and which appeared to all
+mankind, as well as to us, to be that of our party.
+
+These were in general the views of the Tories: and for the part I acted
+in the prosecution of them, as well as of all the measures accessory to
+them, I may appeal to mankind.  To those who had the opportunity of
+looking behind the curtain I may likewise appeal, for the difficulties
+which lay in my way, and for the particular discouragements which I met
+with.  A principal load of parliamentary and foreign affairs in their
+ordinary course lay upon me: the whole negotiation of the peace, and of
+the troublesome invidious steps preliminary to it, as far as they could
+be transacted at home, were thrown upon me.  I continued in the House of
+Commons during that important session which preceded the peace; and
+which, by the spirit shown through the whole course of it, and by the
+resolutions taken in it, rendered the conclusion of the treaties
+practicable.  After this I was dragged into the House of Lords in such a
+manner as to make my promotion a punishment, not a reward; and was there
+left to defend the treaties almost alone.
+
+It would not have been hard to have forced the Earl of Oxford to use me
+better.  His good intentions began to be very much doubted of; the truth
+is, no opinion of his sincerity had ever taken root in the party, and,
+which was worse perhaps for a man in his station, the opinion of his
+capacity began to fall apace.  He was so hard pushed in the House of
+Lords in the beginning of 1712 that he had been forced, in the middle of
+the session, to persuade the Queen to make a promotion of twelve peers at
+once, which was an unprecedented and invidious measure, to be excused by
+nothing but the necessity, and hardly by that.  In the House of Commons
+his credit was low and my reputation very high.  You know the nature of
+that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them
+game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.  The thread of
+the negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going
+back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made himself
+master of the business much time would have been lost, and great
+inconveniences would have followed.  Some, who opposed the Court soon
+after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I
+should have wanted no help to do mischief.  I knew the way of quitting my
+employments and of retiring from Court when the service of my party
+required it; but I could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the
+consequence of it must have been the breaking my party and the distress
+of the public affairs.  I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the
+sense of that duty which I owed her came in aid of other considerations,
+and prevailed over my resentment.  These sentiments, indeed, are so much
+out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a
+bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the
+true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the
+troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under the
+utmost satisfaction.  I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the
+friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford.  I
+was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means
+which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin me in
+the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else.  I saw, however, that he
+had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me, instead of
+having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire,
+an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of his jealousy
+and a reason for undermining me.  In this temper of mind I went on till
+the great work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at
+Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as
+well as for me, opened itself.
+
+I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to
+them, exempt from faults.  Many were made no doubt in both by those who
+were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many were owing
+purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their progress.
+I never look back on this great event, passed as it is, without a secret
+emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the undertaking and the
+importance of its success, with the means employed to bring it about, and
+with those which were employed to traverse it.  To adjust the pretensions
+and to settle the interests of so many princes and states as were engaged
+in the late war would appear, when considered simply and without any
+adventitious difficulty, a work of prodigious extent.  But this was not
+all.  Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands to
+the most extravagant height.  They had been encouraged to this, first, by
+the engagements which we had entered into with several of them, with some
+to draw them into the war, with others to prevail on them to continue it;
+and, secondly, by the manner in which we had treated with France in 1709
+and 1710.  Those who intended to tie the knot of the war as hard, and to
+render the coming at a peace as impracticable as they could, had found no
+method so effectual as that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on
+all he could think of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these
+concessions should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands.
+That this was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one
+of the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who
+communicated to me and to two others of the Queen’s Ministers an instance
+of the Duke of Marlborough’s management at a critical moment, when the
+French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed inclinable to come into an
+expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh article of the preliminaries,
+which could not have been refused.  Certain it is that the King of France
+was at that time in earnest to execute the article of Philip’s
+abdication, and therefore the expedients for adjusting what related to
+this article would easily enough have been found, if on our part there
+had been a real intention of concluding.  But there was no such
+intention, and the plan of those who meant to prolong the war was
+established among the Allies as the plan which ought to be followed
+whenever a peace came to be treated.  The Allies imagined that they had a
+right to obtain at least everything which had been demanded for them
+respectively, and it was visible that nothing less would content them.
+These considerations set the vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient
+light.
+
+The importance of succeeding in the work of the peace was equally great
+to Europe, to our country, to our party, to our persons, to the present
+age, and to future generations.  But I need not take pains to prove what
+no man will deny.  The means employed to bring it about were in no degree
+proportionable.  A few men, some of whom had never been concerned in
+business of this kind before, and most of whom put their hands for a long
+time to it faintly and timorously, were the instruments of it.  The
+Minister who was at their head showed himself every day incapable of that
+attention, that method, that comprehension of different matters, which
+the first post in such a Government as ours requires in quiet times.  He
+was the first spring of all our motion by his credit with the Queen, and
+his concurrence was necessary to everything we did by his rank in the
+State, and yet this man seemed to be sometimes asleep and sometimes at
+play.  He neglected the thread of business, which was carried on for this
+reason with less dispatch and less advantage in the proper channels, and
+he kept none in his own hands.  He negotiated, indeed, by fits and
+starts, by little tools and indirect ways, and thus his activity became
+as hurtful as his indolence, of which I could produce some remarkable
+instances.  No good effect could flow from such a conduct.  In a word,
+when this great affair was once engaged, the zeal of particular men in
+their several provinces drove it forward, though they were not backed by
+the concurrent force of the whole Administration, nor had the common
+helps of advice till it was too late, till the very end of the
+negotiations; even in matters, such as that of commerce, which they could
+not be supposed to understand.  That this is a true account of the means
+used to arrive at the peace, and a true character of that Administration
+in general, I believe the whole Cabinet Council of that time will bear me
+witness.  Sure I am that most of them have joined with me in lamenting
+this state of things whilst it subsisted, and all those who were employed
+as Ministers in the several parts of the treaty felt sufficiently the
+difficulties which this strange management often reduced them to.  I am
+confident they have not forgotten them.
+
+If the means employed to bring the peace about were feeble, and in one
+respect contemptible, those employed to break the negotiation were strong
+and formidable.  As soon as the first suspicion of a treaty’s being on
+foot crept abroad in the world the whole alliance united with a powerful
+party in the nation to obstruct it.  From that hour to the moment the
+Congress of Utrecht finished, no one measure possible to be taken was
+omitted to traverse every advance that was made in this work, to
+intimidate, to allure, to embarrass every person concerned in it.  This
+was done without any regard either to decency or good policy, and from
+hence it soon followed that passion and humour mingled themselves on each
+side.  A great part of what we did for the peace, and of what others did
+against it, can be accounted for on no other principle.  The Allies were
+broken among themselves before they began to treat with the common enemy.
+The matter did not mend in the course of the treaty, and France and
+Spain, but especially the former, profited of this disunion.
+
+Whoever makes the comparison, which I have touched upon, will see the
+true reasons which rendered the peace less answerable to the success of
+the war than it might and than it ought to have been.  Judgment has been
+passed in this case as the different passions or interests of men have
+inspired them.  But the real cause lay in the constitution of our
+Ministry, and much more in the obstinate opposition which we met with
+from the Whigs and from the Allies.  However, sure it is that the defects
+of the peace did not occasion the desertions from the Tory party which
+happened about this time, nor those disorders in the Court which
+immediately followed.
+
+Long before the purport of the treaties could be known, those Whigs who
+had set out with us in 1710 began to relapse back to their party.  They
+had among us shared the harvest of a new Ministry, and, like prudent
+persons, they took measures in time to have their share in that of a new
+Government.
+
+The whimsical or the Hanover Tories continued zealous in appearance with
+us till the peace was signed.  I saw no people so eager for the
+conclusion of it.  Some of them were in such haste that they thought any
+peace preferable to the least delay, and omitted no instances to quicken
+their friends who were actors in it.  As soon as the treaties were
+perfected and laid before the Parliament, the scheme of these gentlemen
+began to disclose itself entirely.  Their love of the peace, like other
+passions, cooled by enjoyment.  They grew nice about the construction of
+the articles, could come up to no direct approbation, and, being let into
+the secret of what was to happen, would not preclude themselves from the
+glorious advantage of rising on the ruins of their friends and of their
+party.
+
+The danger of the succession and the badness of the peace were the two
+principles on which we were attacked.  On the first the whimsical Tories
+joined the Whigs, and declared directly against their party.  Although
+nothing is more certain than this truth: that there was at that time no
+formed design in the party, whatever views some particular men might
+have, against his Majesty’s accession to the throne.  On the latter, and
+most other points, they affected a most glorious neutrality.
+
+Instead of gathering strength, either as a Ministry or as a party, we
+grew weaker every day.  The peace had been judged, with reason, to be the
+only solid foundation whereupon we could erect a Tory system; and yet
+when it was made we found ourselves at a full stand.  Nay, the very work
+which ought to have been the basis of our strength was in part demolished
+before our eyes, and we were stoned with the ruins of it.  Whilst this
+was doing, Oxford looked on as if he had not been a party to all which
+had passed; broke now and then a jest, which savoured of the Inns of
+Court and the bad company in which he had been bred.  And on those
+occasions where his station obliged him to speak of business, was
+absolutely unintelligible.
+
+Whether this man ever had any determined view besides that of raising his
+family is, I believe, a problematical question in the world.  My opinion
+is that he never had any other.  The conduct of a Minister who proposes
+to himself a great and noble object, and who pursues it steadily, may
+seem for a while a riddle to the world; especially in a Government like
+ours, where numbers of men, different in their characters and different
+in their interests, are at all times to be managed; where public affairs
+are exposed to more accidents and greater hazards than in other
+countries; and where, by consequence, he who is at the head of business
+will find himself often distracted by measures which have no relation to
+his purpose, and obliged to bend himself to things which are in some
+degree contrary to his main design.  The ocean which environs us is an
+emblem of our government, and the pilot and the Minister are in similar
+circumstances.  It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct
+course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently seem
+to carry them from it.  But as the work advances the conduct of him who
+leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies
+are reconciled, and when it is once consummated the whole shows itself so
+uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be
+apt to think he could have done the same.  But, on the other hand, a man
+who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of
+ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is
+eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both, who begins every day
+something new, and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose awhile on
+the world; but a little sooner or a little later the mystery will be
+revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but a thread
+of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther
+than living from day to day.  Which of these pictures resembles Oxford
+most you will determine.  I am sorry to be obliged to name him so often,
+but how is it possible to do otherwise while I am speaking of times
+wherein the whole turn of affairs depended on his motions and character?
+
+I have heard, and I believe truly, that when he returned to Windsor in
+the autumn of 1713, after the marriage of his son, he pressed extremely
+to have him created Duke of Newcastle or Earl of Clare, and the Queen
+presuming to hesitate on so extraordinary a proposal, he resented this
+hesitation in a manner which little became a man who had been so lately
+raised by the profusion of her favours upon him.  Certain it is, that he
+began then to show a still greater remissness in all parts of his
+Ministry, and to affect to say that from such a time, the very time I am
+speaking of, he took no share in the direction of affairs, or words to
+that effect.
+
+He pretended to have discovered intrigues which were set on foot against
+him, and particularly he complained of the advantage which was taken of
+his absence during the journey he made at his son’s marriage to undermine
+him with the Queen.  He is naturally inclined to believe the worst, which
+I take to be a certain mark of a mean spirit and a wicked soul.  At
+least, I am sure that the contrary quality, when it is not due to
+weakness of understanding, is the fruit of a generous temper and an
+honest heart.  Prone to judge ill of all mankind, he will rarely be
+seduced by his credulity, but I never knew a man so capable of being the
+bubble of his distrust and jealousy.  He was so in this case, although
+the Queen, who could not be ignorant of the truth, said enough to
+undeceive him.  But to be undeceived, and to own himself so, was not his
+play.  He hoped by cunning to varnish over his want of faith and of
+ability.  He was desirous to make the world impute the extraordinary
+part, or, to speak more properly, the no part, which he acted with the
+staff of Treasurer in his hand, to the Queen’s withdrawing her favour
+from him and to his friends abandoning him—pretences utterly groundless
+when he first made them, and which he brought to be real at last.  Even
+the winter before the Queen’s death, when his credit began to wane apace,
+he might have regained it; he might have reconciled himself perfectly
+with all his ancient friends, and have acquired the confidence of the
+whole party.  I say he might have done all this, because I am persuaded
+that none of those I have named were so convinced of his perfidy, so
+jaded with his yoke, or so much piqued personally against him as I was;
+and yet if he would have exerted himself in concert with us to improve
+the few advantages which were left us and to ward off the visible danger
+which threatened our persons and our party, I would have stifled my
+private animosity and would have acted under him with as much zeal as
+ever.  But he was incapable of taking such a turn.  The sum of all his
+policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long
+as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them.  When it
+became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the
+end of his line.
+
+By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the
+intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had
+endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.
+
+The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution in
+the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded, and by
+the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of a new
+administration.  Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect to them and
+to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be brought about
+before he could effectually serve either.  You cannot have forgot how
+things which we pressed were put off upon every occasion till the peace;
+the peace was to be the date of a new administration, and the period at
+which the millenary year of Toryism should begin.  Thus were the Tories
+at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of
+knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in
+the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French
+Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as
+soon as the peace had rendered them practicable.  He was to attempt
+nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.
+
+After many delays, fatal to the general interest of Europe, this peace
+was signed: and the only considerable thing which he brought about
+afterwards was the marriage I have mentioned above; and by it an
+accession of riches and honour to a family whose estate was very mean,
+and whose illustration before this time I never met with anywhere, but in
+the vain discourses which he used to hold over claret.  If he kept his
+word with any of the parties above-mentioned, it must be supposed that he
+did so with the Whigs; for as to us, we saw nothing after the peace but
+increase of mortification and nearer approaches to ruin.  Not a step was
+made towards completing the settlement of Europe, which the treaties of
+Utrecht and Radstadt left imperfect; towards fortifying and establishing
+the Tory party; towards securing those who had been the principal actors
+in this administration against future events.  We had proceeded in a
+confidence that these things should immediately follow the conclusion of
+the peace: he had never, I dare swear, entertained a thought concerning
+them.  As soon as the last hand was given to the fortune of his family,
+he abandoned his mistress, his friends, and his party, who had borne him
+so many years on their shoulders: and I was present when this want of
+faith was reproached him in the plainest and strongest terms by one of
+the honestest men in Britain, and before some of the most considerable
+Tories.  Even his impudence failed him on this occasion: he did not so
+much as attempt an excuse.
+
+He could not keep his word which he had given the Pretender and his
+adherents, because he had formed no party to support him in such a
+design.  He was sure of having the Whigs against him if he made the
+attempt, and he was not sure of having the Tories for him.
+
+In this state of confusion and distress, to which he had reduced himself
+and us, you remember the part he acted.  He was the spy of the Whigs, and
+voted with us in the morning against those very questions which he had
+penned the night before with Walpole and others.  He kept his post on
+terms which no man but he would have held it on, neither submitting to
+the Queen, nor complying with his friends.  He would not, or he could
+not, act with us; and he resolved that we should not act without him as
+long as he could hinder it.  The Queen’s health was very precarious, and
+at her death he hoped by these means to deliver us up, bound as it were
+hand and foot, to our adversaries.  On the foundation of this merit he
+flattered himself that he had gained some of the Whigs, and softened at
+least the rest of the party to him.  By his secret negotiations at
+Hanover, he took it for granted that he was not only reconciled to that
+Court, but that he should, under his present Majesty’s reign, have as
+much credit as he had enjoyed under that of the Queen.  He was weak
+enough to boast of this, and to promise his good offices voluntarily to
+several: for no man was weak enough to think them worth being solicited.
+In a word, you must have heard that he answered to Lord Dartmouth and to
+Mr. Bromley, that one should keep the Privy Seal, and the other the seals
+of Secretary; and that Lord Cowper makes no scruple of telling how he
+came to offer him the seals of Chancellor.  When the King arrived, he
+went to Greenwich with an affectation of pomp and of favour.  Against his
+suspicious character, he was once in his life the bubble of his
+credulity; and this delusion betrayed him into a punishment more severe
+in my sense than all which has happened to him since, or than perpetual
+exile; he was affronted in the manner in which he was presented to the
+King.  The meanest subject would have been received with goodness, the
+most obnoxious with an air of indifference; but he was received with the
+most distinguishing contempt.  This treatment he had in the face of the
+nation.  The King began his reign, in this instance, with punishing the
+ingratitude, the perfidy, the insolence, which had been shown to his
+predecessor.  Oxford fled from Court covered with shame, the object of
+the derision of the Whigs and of the indignation of the Tories.
+
+The Queen might, if she had pleased, have saved herself from all those
+mortifications she met with during the last months of her reign, and her
+servants and the Tory party from those misfortunes which they endured
+during the same time; perhaps from those which they have fallen into
+since her death.  When she found that the peace, from the conclusion of
+which she expected ease and quiet, brought still greater trouble upon
+her; when she saw the weakness of her Government, and the confusion of
+her affairs increase every day; when she saw her First Minister
+bewildered and unable to extricate himself or her; in fine, when the
+negligence of his public conduct, and the sauciness of his private
+behaviour had rendered him insupportable to her, and she took the
+resolution of laying him aside, there was a strength still remaining
+sufficient to have supported her Government, to have fulfilled in great
+part the expectations of the Tories, and to have constituted both them
+and the Ministers in such a situation as would have left them little to
+apprehend.  Some designs were, indeed, on foot which might have produced
+very great disorders: Oxford’s conduct had given much occasion to them,
+and with the terror of them he endeavoured to intimidate the Queen.  But
+expedients were not hard to be found by which those designs might have
+been nipped in the bud, or else by which the persons who promoted them
+might have been induced to lay them aside.  But that fatal irresolution
+inherent to the Stuart race hung upon her.  She felt too much inward
+resentment to be able to conceal his disgrace from him; yet, after he had
+made this discovery, she continued to trust all her power in his hands.
+
+No people ever were in such a condition as ours continued to be from the
+autumn of 1713 to the summer following.  The Queen’s health sank every
+day.  The attack which she had in the winter at Windsor served as a
+warning both to those who wished, and to those who feared her death, to
+expect it.  The party which opposed the court had been continually
+gaining strength by the weakness of our administration: and at this time
+their numbers were vastly increased, and their spirit was raised by the
+near prospect of the succession taking place.  We were not at liberty to
+exert the strength we had.  We saw our danger, and many of us saw the
+true means of avoiding it; but whilst the magic wand was in the same
+hands, this knowledge served only to increase our uneasiness; and,
+whether we would or no, we were forced with our eyes open to walk on
+towards the precipice.  Every moment we became less able, if the Queen
+lived, to support her Government; if she died, to secure ourselves.  One
+side was united in a common view, and acted upon a uniform plan: the
+other had really none at all.  We knew that we were out of favour at the
+Court of Hanover, that we were represented there as Jacobites, and that
+the Elector, his present Majesty, had been rendered publicly a party to
+that opposition, in spite of which we made the peace: and yet we neither
+had taken, nor could take in our present circumstances, any measures to
+be better or worse there.  Thus we languished till the 27th of July,
+1714, when the Queen dismissed the Treasurer.  On the Friday following,
+she fell into an apoplexy, and died on Sunday the 1st of August.
+
+You do me, I daresay, the justice to believe that whilst this state of
+things lasted I saw very well, how little mention soever I might make of
+it at the time, that no man in the Ministry, or in the party, was so much
+exposed as myself.  I could expect no quarter from the Whigs, for I had
+deserved none.  There were persons amongst them for whom I had great
+esteem and friendship; yet neither with these, nor with any others, had I
+preserved a secret correspondence, which might be of use to me in the day
+of distress: and besides the general character of my party, I knew that
+particular prejudices were entertained against me at Hanover.  The Whigs
+wanted nothing but an opportunity of attacking the peace, and it could
+hardly be imagined that they would stop there.  In which case I knew that
+they could have hold on no man so much as myself: the instructions, the
+orders, the memorials had been drawn by me; the correspondence relating
+to it in France, and everywhere else, had been carried on by me; in a
+word, my hand appeared to almost every paper which had been writ in the
+whole course of the negotiation.  To all these considerations I added
+that of the weight of personal resentment, which I had created against
+myself at home and abroad: in part unavoidably, by the share I was
+obliged to take in these affairs; and in part, if you will,
+unnecessarily, by the warmth of my temper, and by some unguarded
+expressions, for which I have no excuse to make but that which Tacitus
+makes for his father-in-law, Julius Agricola: “honestius putabam
+offendere, quam odisse.”
+
+Having this prospect of being distinguished from the rest of my party, in
+the common calamity, by severer treatment, I might have justified myself,
+by reason and by great authorities too, if I had made early provision, at
+least to be safe when I should be no longer useful.  How I could have
+secured this point I do not think fit to explain: but certain it is that
+I made no one step towards it.  I resolved not to abandon my party by
+turning Whig, or, which is worse a great deal, whimsical; nor to treat
+separately from it.  I resolved to keep myself at liberty to act on a
+Tory bottom.  If the Queen disgraced Oxford and continued to live
+afterwards, I knew we should have time and means to provide for our
+future safety: if the Queen died, and left us in the same unfortunate
+circumstances, I expected to suffer for and with the Tories; and I was
+prepared for it.
+
+The thunder had long grumbled in the air; and yet when the bolt fell,
+most of our party appeared as much surprised as if they had had no reason
+to expect it.  There was a perfect calm and universal submission through
+the whole kingdom.  The Chevalier, indeed, set out as if his design had
+been to gain the coast and to embark for Great Britain; and the Court of
+France made a merit to themselves of stopping him and obliging him to
+return.  But this, to my certain knowledge, was a farce acted by concert,
+to keep up an opinion of his character, when all opinion of his cause
+seemed to be at an end.  He owned this concert to me at Bar, on the
+occasion of my telling him that he would have found no party ready to
+receive him, and that the enterprise would have been to the last degree
+extravagant.  He was at this time far from having any encouragement: no
+party numerous enough to make the least disturbance was formed in his
+favour.  On the King’s arrival the storm arose.  The menaces of the
+Whigs, backed by some very rash declarations, by little circumstances of
+humour which frequently offend more than real injuries, and by the entire
+change of all the persons in employment, blew up the coals.
+
+At first many of the Tories had been made to entertain some faint hopes
+that they would be permitted to live in quiet.  I have been assured that
+the King left Hanover in that resolution.  Happy had it been for him and
+for us if he had continued in it; if the moderation of his temper had not
+been overborne by the violence of party, and his and the national
+interest sacrificed to the passions of a few.  Others there were among
+the Tories who had flattered themselves with much greater expectations
+than these, and who had depended, not on such imaginary favour and
+dangerous advancement as was offered them afterwards, but on real credit
+and substantial power under the new government.  Such impressions on the
+minds of men had rendered the two Houses of Parliament, which were then
+sitting, as good courtiers to King George as ever they had been to Queen
+Anne.  But all these hopes being at once and with violence extinguished,
+despair succeeded in their room.
+
+Our party began soon to act like men delivered over to their passions,
+and unguided by any other principle; not like men fired by a just
+resentment and a reasonable ambition to a bold undertaking.  They treated
+the Government like men who were resolved not to live under it: and yet
+they took no one measure to support themselves against it.  They
+expressed, without reserve or circumspection, an eagerness to join in any
+attempt against the Establishment which they had received and confirmed,
+and which many of them had courted but a few weeks before; and yet in the
+midst of all this bravery, when the election of the new Parliament came
+on, some of these very men acted with the coolness of those who are much
+better disposed to compound than to take arms.
+
+The body of the Tories being in this temper, it is not to be wondered at
+if they heated one another, and began apace to turn their eyes towards
+the Pretender; and if those few who had already engaged with him, applied
+themselves to improve the conjuncture, and endeavoured to list a party
+for him.
+
+I went, about a month after the Queen’s death, as soon as the Seals were
+taken from me, into the country; and whilst I continued there, I felt the
+general disposition to Jacobitism increase daily among people of all
+ranks; amongst several who had been constantly distinguished by their
+aversion to that cause.  But at my return to London in the month of
+February or March, 1715, a few weeks before I left England, I began for
+the first time in my whole life to perceive these general dispositions
+ripen into resolutions, and to observe some regular workings among many
+of our principal friends, which denoted a scheme of this kind.  These
+workings, indeed, were very faint; for the persons concerned in carrying
+them on did not think it safe to speak too plainly to men who were, in
+truth, ill disposed to the Government because they neither found their
+account at present under it nor had been managed with art enough to leave
+them hopes of finding it hereafter, but who at the same time had not the
+least affection for the Pretender’s person, nor any principle favourable
+to his interest.
+
+This was the state of things when the new Parliament which his Majesty
+had called assembled.  A great majority of the elections had gone in
+favour of the Whigs; to which the want of concert among the Tories had
+contributed as much as the vigour of that party and the influence of the
+new Government.  The Whigs came to the opening of this Parliament full of
+as much violence as could possess men who expected to make their court,
+to confirm themselves in power, and to gratify their resentments by the
+same measures.  I have heard that it was a dispute among the Ministers
+how far this spirit should be indulged; and that the King was determined,
+or confirmed in a determination, to consent to the prosecutions, and to
+give the reins to the party, by the representations that were made to him
+that great difficulties would arise in the conduct of the Session if the
+Court should appear inclined to check this spirit, and by Mr. W—’s
+undertaking to carry all the business successfully through the House of
+Commons if they were at liberty.  Such has often been the unhappy fate of
+our Princes: a real necessity sometimes, and sometimes a seeming one, has
+forced them to compound with a part of the nation at the expense of the
+whole; and the success of their business for one year has been purchased
+at the price of public disorder for many.
+
+The conjuncture I am speaking of affords a memorable instance of this
+truth.  If milder measures had been pursued, certain it is that the
+Tories had never universally embraced Jacobitism.  The violence of the
+Whigs forced them into the arms of the Pretender.  The Court and the
+party seemed to vie with one another which should go the greatest lengths
+in severity: and the Ministers, whose true interest it must at all times
+be to calm the minds of men, and who ought never to set the examples of
+extraordinary inquiries or extraordinary accusations, were upon this
+occasion the tribunes of the people.
+
+The Council of Regency which began to sit as soon as the Queen died,
+acted like a council of the Holy Office.  Whoever looked on the face of
+the nation saw everything quiet; not one of those symptoms appearing
+which must have shown themselves more or less at that moment if in
+reality there had been any measures taken during the former reign to
+defeat the Protestant succession.  His Majesty ascended the throne with
+as little contradiction and as little trouble as ever a son succeeded a
+father in the possession of a private patrimony.  But he who had the
+opportunity, which I had till my dismission, of seeing a great part of
+what passed in that Council, would have thought that there had been an
+opposition actually formed, that the new Establishment was attacked
+openly from without and betrayed from within.
+
+The same disposition continued after the King’s arrival.  This political
+Inquisition went on with all the eagerness imaginable in seizing of
+papers, in ransacking the Queen’s closet, and examining even her private
+letters.  The Whigs had clamoured loudly, and affirmed in the face of the
+world that the nation had been sold to France, to Spain, to the
+Pretender; and whilst they endeavoured in vain, by very singular methods,
+to find some colour to justify what they had advanced without proof, they
+put themselves under an absolute necessity of grounding the most solemn
+prosecution on things whereof they might indeed have proof, but which
+would never pass for crimes before any judges but such as were parties at
+the same time.
+
+In the King’s first Speech from the Throne all the inflaming hints were
+given, and all the methods of violence were chalked out to the two
+Houses.  The first steps in both were perfectly answerable; and, to the
+shame of the peerage be it spoken, I saw at that time several lords
+concur to condemn in one general vote all that they had approved of in a
+former Parliament by many particular resolutions.  Among several bloody
+resolutions proposed and agitated at this time, the resolution of
+impeaching me of high treason was taken; and I took that of leaving
+England, not in a panic terror improved by the artifices of the Duke of
+Marlborough (whom I knew even at that time too well to act by his advice
+or information in any case), but on such grounds as the proceedings which
+soon followed sufficiently justified, and as I have never repented
+building upon.  Those who blamed it in the first heat were soon after
+obliged to change their language; for what other resolution could I take?
+The method of prosecution designed against me would have put me
+immediately out of condition to act for myself, or to serve those who
+were less exposed than me, but who were, however, in danger.  On the
+other hand, how few were there on whose assistance I could depend, or to
+whom I would, even in those circumstances, be obliged?  The ferment in
+the nation was wrought up to a considerable height; but there was at that
+time no reason to expect that it could influence the proceedings in
+Parliament in favour of those who should be accused.  Left to its own
+movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the
+prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions?  The Tories who had
+been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour
+could be expected from them.  The Whimsicals, disappointed of the figure
+which they hoped to make, began, indeed, to join their old friends.  One
+of the principal amongst them was so very good as to confess to me that
+if the Court had called the servants of the late Queen to account, and
+had stopped there, he must have considered himself as a judge, and have
+acted according to his conscience on what should have appeared to him;
+but that war had been declared to the whole Tory party, and that now the
+state of things was altered.  This discourse needed no commentary, and
+proved to me that I had never erred in the judgment I made of this set of
+men.  Could I then resolve to be obliged to them, or to suffer with
+Oxford?  As much as I still was heated by the disputes in which I had
+been all my life engaged against the Whigs, I would sooner have chose to
+owe my security to their indulgence than to the assistance of the
+Whimsicals; but I thought banishment, with all her train of evils,
+preferable to either.  I abhorred Oxford to that degree that I could not
+bear to be joined with him in any case.  Nothing, perhaps, contributed so
+much to determine me as this sentiment.  A sense of honour would not have
+permitted me to distinguish between his case and mine own; and it was
+worse than death to lie under the necessity of making them the same, and
+of taking measures in concert with him.
+
+I am now come to the time at which I left England, and have finished the
+first part of that deduction of facts which I proposed to lay before you.
+I am hopeful that you will not think it altogether tedious or
+unnecessary; for although very little of what I have said can be new to
+you, yet this summary account will enable you with greater ease to recall
+to your memory the passages of those four years wherewith all that I am
+going to relate to you has an immediate and necessary connection.
+
+In what has been said I am far from making my own panegyric.  I had not
+in those days so much merit as was ascribed to me, nor since that time
+have I had so little as the same persons allowed me.  I committed,
+without dispute, many faults, and a greater man than I can pretend to be,
+constituted in the same circumstances, would not have kept clear of all;
+but with respect to the Tories I committed none.  I carried the point of
+party honour to the height, and specified everything to my attachment to
+them during this period of time.  Let us now examine whether I have done
+so during the rest.
+
+When I arrived in France, about the end of March, 1715, the affairs of
+England were represented to me in another light than I had seen them in
+when I looked upon them with my own eyes very few weeks before.  I found
+the persons who were detached to speak with me prepared to think that I
+came over to negotiate for the Pretender; and when they perceived that I
+was more ignorant than they imagined, I was assured by them that there
+would be suddenly a universal rising in England and Scotland.  The
+leaders were named to me, their engagements specified, and many
+gentlemen, yourself among others, were reckoned upon for particular
+services, though I was certain you had never been treated with; from
+whence I concluded, and the event has justified my opinion, that these
+assurances had been given on the general characters of men by such of our
+friends as had embarked sooner and gone farther than the rest.
+
+This management surprised me extremely.  In the answers I made I
+endeavoured to set the mistake right, to show that things were far from
+the point of maturity imagined, that the Chevalier had yet no party for
+him, and that nothing could form one but the extreme violence which the
+Whigs threatened to exercise.  Great endeavours were used to engage me in
+this affair, and to prevail on me to answer the letter of invitation sent
+me from Bar.  I alleged, as it was true, that I had no commission from
+any person in England, and that the friends I left behind me were the
+only persons who could determine me, if any could, to take such a step.
+As to the last proposition, I absolutely refused it.
+
+In the uncertainty of what would happen—whether the prosecutions would be
+pushed, which was most probable, in the manner intended against me, and
+against others, for all of whom, except the Earl of Oxford, I had as much
+concern as for myself; or whether the Whigs would relent, drop some, and
+soften the fate of others—I resolved to conduct myself so as to create no
+appearance which might be strained into a pretence for hard usage, and
+which might be retorted on my friends when they debated for me, or when
+they defended themselves.  I saw the Earl of Stair; I promised him that I
+would enter into no Jacobite engagements, and I kept my word with him.  I
+wrote a letter to Mr. Secretary Stanhope which might take off any
+imputation of neglect of the Government, and I retired into Dauphine to
+remove the objection of residence near the Court of France.
+
+This retreat from Paris was censured in England, and styled a desertion
+of my friends and of their cause, with what foundation let any reasonable
+man determine.  Had I engaged with the Pretender before the party acted
+for him, or required of me that I should do so, I had taken the air of
+being his man; whereas I looked on myself as theirs.  I had gone about to
+bring them into his measures; whereas I never intended, even since that
+time, to do anything more than to make him as far as possible act
+conformably to their views.
+
+During the short time I continued on the banks of the Rhone the
+prosecutions were carried on at Westminster with the utmost violence, and
+the ferment among the people was risen to such a degree that it could end
+in nothing better—it might have ended in something worse—than it did.
+The measures which I observed at Paris had turned to no account; on the
+contrary, the letter which I wrote to Mr. Secretary Stanhope was quoted
+as a base and fawning submission, and what I intended as a mark of
+respect to the Government and a service to my friends was perverted to
+ruin me in the opinion of the latter.  The Act of Attainder, in
+consequence of my impeachment, had passed against me for crimes of the
+blackest dye; and among other inducements to pass it, my having been
+engaged in the Pretender’s interest was one.  How well founded this
+Article was has already appeared; I was just as guilty of the rest.  The
+correspondence with me was, you know, neither frequent nor safe.  I heard
+seldom and darkly from you, and though I saw well enough which way the
+current ran, yet I was entirely ignorant of the measures you took, and of
+the use you intended to make of me.  I contented myself, therefore, with
+letting you all know that you had but to command me, and that I was ready
+to venture in your service the little which remained, as frankly as I had
+exposed all which was gone.  At last your commands came, and I shall show
+you in what manner I executed them.
+
+The person who was sent to me arrived in the beginning of July, 1715, at
+the place where I was.  He spoke in the name of all the friends whose
+authority could influence me, and he brought me word that Scotland was
+not only ready to take arms, but under some sort of dissatisfaction to be
+withheld from beginning; that in England the people were exasperated
+against the Government to such a degree that, far from wanting to be
+encouraged, they could not be restrained from insulting it on every
+occasion; that the whole Tory party was become avowedly Jacobite; that
+many officers of the army and the majority of the soldiers were very well
+affected to the cause; that the City of London was ready to rise; and
+that the enterprises for seizing of several places were ripe for
+execution: in a word, that most of the principal Tories were in a concert
+with the Duke of Ormond, for I had pressed particularly to be informed
+whether his Grace acted alone, or, if not, who were his council; and that
+the others were so disposed that there remained no doubt of their joining
+as soon as the first blow should be struck.  He added that my friends
+were a little surprised to observe that I lay neuter in such a
+conjuncture.  He represented to me the danger I ran of being prevented by
+people of all sides from having the merit of engaging early in this
+enterprise, and how unaccountable it would be for a man impeached and
+attainted under the present Government to take no share in bringing about
+a revolution so near at hand and so certain.  He entreated that I would
+defer no longer to join the Chevalier, to advise and assist in carrying
+on his affairs, and to solicit and negotiate at the Court of France,
+where my friends imagined that I should not fail to meet with a
+favourable reception, and from whence they made no doubt of receiving
+assistance in a situation of affairs so critical, so unexpected, and so
+promising.  He concluded by giving me a letter from the Pretender, whom
+he had seen in his way to me, in which I was pressed to repair without
+loss of time to Commercy; and this instance was grounded on the message
+which the bearer of the letter had brought me from my friends in England.
+Since he was sent to me, it had been more proper to have come directly
+where I was; but he was in haste to make his own court, and to deliver
+the assurances which were entrusted to him.  Perhaps, too, he imagined
+that he should tie the knot faster on me by acquainting me that my
+friends had actually engaged for themselves and me, than by barely
+telling me that they desired I would engage for myself and them.
+
+In the progress of the conversation he related a multitude of facts which
+satisfied me as to the general disposition of the people; but he gave me
+little satisfaction as to the measures taken for improving this
+disposition, for driving the business on with vigour if it tended to a
+revolution, or for supporting it with advantage if it spun into a war.
+When I questioned him concerning several persons whose disinclination to
+the Government admitted of no doubt, and whose names, quality, and
+experience were very essential to the success of the undertaking, he
+owned to me that they kept a great reserve, and did, at most, but
+encourage others to act by general and dark expressions.
+
+I received this account and this summons ill in my bed; yet, important as
+the matter was, a few minutes served to determine me.  The circumstances
+wanting to form a reasonable inducement to engage did not escape me.  But
+the smart of a Bill of Attainder tingled in every vein; and I looked on
+my party to be under oppression and to call for my assistance.  Besides
+which I considered, first, that I should certainly be informed, when I
+conferred with the Chevalier, of many particulars unknown to this
+gentleman; for I did not imagine that you could be so near to take arms,
+as he represented you to be, on no other foundation than that which he
+exposed.  And, secondly, that I was obliged in honour to declare, without
+waiting for a more particular information of what might be expected from
+England, since my friends had taken their resolution to declare, without
+any previous assurance of what might be expected from France.  This
+second motive weighed extremely with me at that time; there is, however,
+more sound than sense in it, and it contains the original error to which
+all your subsequent errors, and the thread of misfortunes which followed,
+are to be ascribed.
+
+My resolution thus taken, I lost no time in repairing to Commercy.  The
+very first conversations with the Chevalier answered in no degree my
+expectations; and I assure you, with great truth, that I began even then,
+if not to repent of my own rashness, yet to be fully convinced both of
+yours and mine.
+
+He talked to me like a man who expected every moment to set out for
+England or Scotland, but who did not very well know for which.  And when
+he entered into the particulars of his affairs I found that concerning
+the former he had nothing more circumstantial nor positive to go upon
+than what I had already heard.  The advices which were sent from thence
+contained such assurances of success as it was hard to think that men who
+did not go upon the surest grounds would presume to give.  But then these
+assurances were general, and the authority seldom satisfactory.  Those
+which came from the best hands were verbal, and often conveyed by very
+doubtful messengers; others came from men whose fortunes were as
+desperate as their counsels; and others came from persons whose situation
+in the world gave little reason to attend to their judgment in matters of
+this kind.
+
+The Duke of Ormond had been for some time, I cannot say how long, engaged
+with the Chevalier.  He had taken the direction of this whole affair, as
+far as it related to England, upon himself, and had received a commission
+for this purpose, which contained the most ample powers that could be
+given.  After this, one would be apt to imagine that the principles on
+which the Pretender should proceed, and the Tories engage, in this
+service had been laid down; that a regular and certain method of
+correspondence had been established; that the necessary assistances had
+been specified; and that positive assurances had been given of them.
+Nothing less.  In a matter as serious as this, all was loose and
+abandoned to the disposition of fortune.  The first point had never been
+touched upon; by what I have said above you see how little care was taken
+of the second; and as to the third, the Duke had asked a small body of
+regular forces, a sum of money, and a quantity of arms and ammunition.
+He had been told in answer by the Court of France that he must absolutely
+despair of any number of troops whatever, but he had been made in general
+to hope for some money, some arms, and some ammunition; a little sum had,
+I think, been advanced to him.  In a case so plain as this it is hard to
+conceive how any man could err.  The assistances demanded from France at
+this time, and even greater than these, will appear, in the sequel of
+this relation, by the sense of the whole party, to have been deemed
+essentially necessary to success.  In such an uncertainty, therefore,
+whether even these could be obtained, or rather with so much reason to
+apprehend that they could not, it was evident that the Tories ought to
+have lain still.  They might have helped the ferment against the
+Government, but should have avoided with the utmost care the giving any
+alarm or even suspicion of their true design, and have resumed or not
+resumed it as the Chevalier was able or not able to provide the troops,
+the arms, the money, etc.  Instead of which those who were at the head of
+the undertaking, and therefore answerable for the measures which were
+pursued, suffered the business to jog merrily on.  They knew in general
+how little dependence was to be placed on foreign succour, but acted as
+if they had been sure of it; while the party were rendered sanguine by
+their passions, and made no doubt of subverting a Government they were
+angry with, both one and the other made as much bustle and gave as great
+alarm as would have been imprudent even at the eve of a general
+insurrection.  This appeared to me to be the state of things with respect
+to England when I arrived at Commercy.
+
+The Scots had long pressed the Chevalier to come amongst them, and had of
+late sent frequent messages to quicken his departure, some of which were
+delivered in terms much more zealous than respectful.  The truth is, they
+seemed in as much haste to begin as if they had thought themselves able
+to do the work alone; as if they had been apprehensive of no danger but
+that of seeing it taken out of their hands and of having the honour of it
+shared by others.  However, that which was wanting on the part of England
+was not wanting in Scotland; the Scots talked aloud, but they were in a
+condition to rise.  They took little care to keep their intentions
+secret, but they were disposed to put those intentions into immediate
+execution, and thereby to render the secret no longer necessary.  They
+knew upon whom to depend for every part of the work, and they had
+concerted with the Chevalier even to the place of his landing.
+
+There was need of no great sagacity to perceive how unequal such
+foundations were to the weight of the building designed to be raised on
+them.  The Scots, with all their zeal and all their valour, could bring
+no revolution about unless in concurrence with the English; and among the
+latter nothing was ripe for such an undertaking but the temper of the
+people, if that was so.  I thought, therefore, that the Pretender’s
+friends in the North should be kept from rising till those in the South
+had put themselves in a condition to act; and that in the meanwhile the
+utmost endeavours ought to be used with the King of France to espouse the
+cause; and that a plan of the design, with a more particular
+specification of the succours desired, as well as of the time when and
+the place to which they should be conveyed, ought to be written for;—all
+which I was told by the Marshal of Berwick, who had the principal
+direction at that time of these affairs in France, and I daresay very
+truly, had been often asked, but never sent.  I looked on this enterprise
+to be of the nature of those which can hardly be undertaken more than
+once, and I judged that the success of it would depend on timing as near
+as possible together the insurrection in both parts of the island and the
+succours from hence.  The Pretender approved this opinion of mine.  He
+instructed me accordingly, and I left Lorraine after having accepted the
+Seals much against my inclination.  I made one condition with him; it was
+this—that I should be at liberty to quit a station which my humour and
+many other considerations made me think myself very unfit for, whenever
+the occasion upon which I engaged was over, one way or other; and I
+desire you to remember that I did so.
+
+I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715.  You will observe that
+all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for,
+was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours
+necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from
+England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and
+whither they should be sent.  Here I found a multitude of people at work,
+and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination,
+no order, no concert.  Persons concerned in the management of these
+affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case.
+It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now.  The
+Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the
+present designs as infallible.  Every meeting-house which the populace
+demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm
+them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst
+them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the
+Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about,
+without him, in a very few weeks.
+
+Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face.  Those who could write and
+read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this pitch of
+erudition had their secrets to whisper.  No sex was excluded from this
+Ministry.  Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have seen in England, kept her
+corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great wheel of our machine.
+
+I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least too
+strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the water at
+the same time.  The letters which came from thence seemed to me to
+contain rather such things as the writers wished might be true, than such
+as they knew to be so: and the accounts which were sent from hence were
+of the same kind.  The vanity of some and the credulity of others
+supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I question not but very
+many persons, some such I have known, did the same thing from a principle
+which they took to be a very wise one: they imagined that they helped by
+these means to maintain and to increase the spirit of the party in
+England and France.  They acted like Thoas, that turbulent Ætolian, who
+brought Antiochus into Greece: “quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando
+verbis copias ejus, erexerat multorum in Græcia animos; iisdem et regis
+spem inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi.”  Thus were numbers of people
+employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an affectation
+of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and in sounding the
+alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their interest to surprise.
+The Government of England was put on its guard: and the necessity of
+acting, or of laying aside with some disadvantage all thoughts of acting
+for the present, was precipitated before any measures necessary to enable
+you to act had been prepared, or almost thought of.
+
+If his Majesty did not, till some short time after this, declare the
+intended invasion to Parliament it was not for want of information.
+Before I came to Paris, what was doing had been discovered.  The little
+armament made at the Havre, which furnished the only means the Chevalier
+then had for his transportation into Britain, which had exhausted the
+treasury of St. Germains, and which contained all the arms and ammunition
+that could be depended upon for the whole undertaking, though they were
+hardly sufficient to begin the work even in Scotland, was talked of
+publicly.  A Minister less alert and less capable than the Earl of Stair
+would easily have been at the bottom of the secret, for so it was called,
+when the particulars of messages received and sent, the names of the
+persons from whom they came, and by whom they were carried, were
+whispered about at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.
+
+In short, what by the indiscretion of people here, what by the rebound
+which came often back from London, what by the private interests and
+ambitious views of persons in the French Court, and what by other causes
+unnecessary to be examined now, the most private transactions came to
+light: and they who imagined that they trusted their heads to the keeping
+of one or two friends, were in reality at the mercy of numbers.  Into
+such company was I fallen for my sins; and it is upon the credit of such
+a mob Ministry that the Tories have judged me capable of betraying a
+trust, or incapable of discharging it.
+
+I had made very little progress in the business which brought me to
+Paris, when the paper so long expected was sent, in pursuance of former
+instances, from England.  The unanimous sense of the principal persons
+engaged was contained in it.  The whole had been dictated word for word
+to the gentleman who brought it over, by the Earl of Mar, and it had been
+delivered to him by the Duke of Ormond.  I was driving in the wide ocean
+without a compass when this dropped unexpectedly into my hands.  I
+received it joyfully, and I steered my course exactly by it.  Whether the
+persons from whom it came pursued the principles and observed the rules
+which they laid down as the measures of their own conduct and of ours,
+will appear by the sequel of this relation.
+
+This memorial asserted that there were no hopes of succeeding in a
+present undertaking, for many reasons deduced in it, without an immediate
+and universal rising of the people in all parts of England upon the
+Chevalier’s arrival; and that this insurrection was in no degree probable
+unless he brought a body of regular troops along with him: that if this
+attempt miscarried, his cause and his friends, the English liberty and
+Government, would be utterly ruined: but if by coming without troops he
+resolved to risk these and everything else, he must set out so as not to
+arrive before the end of September, to justify which opinion many
+arguments were urged.  In this case twenty thousand arms, a train of
+artillery, five hundred officers with their servants, and a considerable
+sum of money were demanded: and as soon as they should be informed that
+the Chevalier was in condition to make this provision, it was said that
+notice should be given him of the places to which he might send, and of
+the persons who were to be trusted.  I do not mention some inconveniences
+which they touched upon arising from a delay; because their opinion was
+clearly for this delay, and because that they could not suppose that the
+Chevalier would act, or that those about him would advise him to act,
+contrary to the sense of all his friends in England.  No time was lost in
+making the proper use of this paper.  As much of it as was fit to be
+shown to this Court was translated into French, and laid before the King
+of France.  I was now able to speak with greater assurance, and in some
+sort to undertake conditionally for the event of things.
+
+The proposal of violating treaties so lately and so solemnly concluded,
+was a very bold one to be made to people, whatever their inclinations
+might be, whom the war had reduced to the lowest ebb of riches and power.
+They would not hear of a direct and open engagement, such as the sending
+a body of troops would have been; neither would they grant the whole of
+what was asked in the second plan.  But it was impossible for them, or
+any one else, to foresee how far those steps which they were willing to
+take, well improved, might have encouraged or forced them to go.  They
+granted us some succours, and the very ship in which the Pretender was to
+transport himself was fitted out by Depine d’Anicant at the King of
+France’s expense.  They would have concealed these appearances as much as
+they could; but the heat of the Whigs and the resentment of the Court of
+England might have drawn them in.  We should have been glad indirectly to
+concur in fixing these things upon them: and, in a word, if the late King
+had lived six months longer, I verily believe there had been war again
+between England and France.  This was the only point of time when these
+affairs had, to my apprehension, the least reasonable appearance even of
+possibility: all that preceded was wild and uncertain: all that followed
+was mad and desperate.  But this favourable aspect had an extreme short
+duration.  Two events soon happened, one of which cast a damp on all we
+were doing, and the other rendered vain and fruitless all we had done.
+The first was the arrival of the Duke of Ormond in France, the other was
+the death of the King.
+
+We had sounded the duke’s name high.  His reputation and the opinion of
+his power were great.  The French began to believe that he was able to
+form and to head a party; that the troops would join him; that the nation
+would follow the signal whenever he drew his sword; and the voice of the
+people, the echo of which was continually in their ears, confirmed them
+in this belief.  But when, in the midst of all these bright ideas, they
+saw him arrive, almost literally alone, when, to excuse his coming, I was
+obliged to tell them that he could not stay, they sank at once from their
+hopes, and that which generally happens happened in this case: because
+they had had too good an opinion of the cause, they began to form too bad
+a one.  Before this time, if they had no friendship for the Tories, they
+had at least some consideration and esteem.  After this, I saw nothing
+but compassion in the best of them, and contempt in the others.
+
+When I arrived at Paris, the King was already gone to Marly, where the
+indisposition which he had begun to feel at Versailles increased upon
+him.  He was the best friend the Chevalier had: and when I engaged in
+this business, my principal dependence was on his personal character.
+This failed me to a great degree; he was not in a condition to exert the
+same vigour as formerly.  The Ministers who saw so great an event as his
+death to be probably at hand, a certain minority, an uncertain regency,
+perhaps confusion, at best a new face of Government and a new system of
+affairs, would not, for their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the
+public, venture to engage far in any new measures.  All I had to
+negotiate by myself first, and in conjunction with the Duke of Ormond
+soon afterwards, languished with the King.  My hopes sank as he declined,
+and died when he expired.  The event of things has sufficiently shown
+that all those which were entertained by the duke and the Jacobite party
+under the Regency, were founded on the grossest delusions imaginable.
+Thus was the project become impracticable before the time arrived which
+was fixed by those who directed things in England for putting it in
+execution.
+
+The new Government of France appeared to me like a strange country.  I
+was little acquainted with the roads.  Most of the faces I met with were
+unknown to me, and I hardly understood the language of the people.  Of
+the men who had been in power under the late reign, many were discarded,
+and most of the others were too much taken up with the thoughts of
+securing themselves under this, to receive applications in favour of the
+Pretender.  The two men who had the greatest appearance of favour and
+power were D’Aguesseau and Noailles.  One was made Chancellor, on the
+death of Voisin, from Attorney-General; and the other was placed at the
+head of the Treasury.  The first passes for a man of parts, but he never
+acted out of the sphere of the law: I had no acquaintance with him before
+this time; and when you consider his circumstances and mine, you will not
+think it could be very easy for me to get access to him now.  The latter
+I had known extremely well whilst the late King lived: and from the same
+Court principle, as he was glad to be well with me then, he would hardly
+know me now.  The Minister who had the principal direction of foreign
+affairs I lived in friendship with, and I must own, to his honour, that
+he never encouraged a design which he knew that his Court had no
+intention of supporting.
+
+There were other persons, not to tire you with farther particulars upon
+this head, of credit and influence with whom I found indirect and private
+ways of conversing; but it was in vain to expect any more than civil
+language from them in a case which they found no disposition in their
+Master to countenance, and in favour of which they had no prejudices of
+their own.  The private engagements into which the Duke of Orleans had
+entered with his Majesty during the life of the late King will abate of
+their force as the Regent grows into strength, and would soon have had no
+force at all if the Pretender had met with success: but in these
+beginnings they operated very strongly.  The air of this Court was to
+take the counterpart of all which had been thought right under Louis XIV.
+“Cela resemble trop à l’ancien système” was an answer so often given that
+it became a jest and almost a proverb.  But to finish this account with a
+fact which is incredible, but strictly true; the very peace which had
+saved France from ruin, and the makers of it, were become as unpopular at
+this Court as at the Court of Vienna.
+
+The Duke of Ormond flattered himself, in this state of things, that he
+had opened a private and sure channel of arriving at the Regent, and of
+bending him to his purposes.  His Grace and I lived together at this time
+in an house which one of my friends had lent me.  I observed that he was
+frequently lost, and that he made continual excursions out of town, with
+all the mysterious precaution imaginable.  I doubted at first whether
+those intrigues related to business or pleasure.  I soon discovered with
+whom they were carried on, and had reason to believe that both were
+mingled in them.  It is necessary that I explain this secret to you.
+
+Mrs. Trant, whom I have named above, had been preparing herself for the
+retired abstemious life of a Carmelite by taking a surfeit of the
+pleasures of Paris, when, a little before the death of the Queen, or
+about that time, she went into England.  What she was entrusted either by
+the Chevalier, or any other person, to negotiate there, I am ignorant of;
+and it imports not much to know.  In that journey she made or renewed an
+acquaintance with the Duke of Ormond.  The scandalous chronicle affirms
+that she brought with her, when she returned into France, a woman of whom
+I have not the least knowledge, but who was probably handsome, since
+without beauty such a merchandise would not have been saleable, nor have
+answered the design of the importer; and that she made this way her court
+to the Regent.  Whatever her merit was, she kept a correspondence with
+him, and put herself upon that foot of familiarity which he permits all
+those who contribute to his pleasures to assume.  She was placed by him,
+as she told me herself, where I found her some time after that which I am
+speaking of, in the house of an ancient gentlewoman who had formerly been
+Maid of Honour to Madame, and who had contracted at Court a spirit of
+intrigue which accompanied her in her retreat.
+
+These two had associated to them the Abbé de Tesieu in all the political
+parts of their business; for I will not suppose that so reverend an
+ecclesiastic entered into any other secret.  This Abbé is the Regent’s
+secretary; and it was chiefly through him that the private treaty had
+been carried on between his master and the Earl of Stair in the King’s
+reign.  Whether the priest had stooped at the lure of a cardinal’s hat,
+or whether he acted the second part by the same orders that he acted the
+first, I know not.  This is sure, and the British Minister was not the
+bubble of it—that whilst he concerted measures on one hand to traverse
+the Pretender’s designs, he testified on the other all the inclination
+possible to his service.  A mad fellow who had been an intendant in
+Normandy, and several other politicians of the lowest form, were at
+different times taken into this famous Junto.
+
+With these worthy people his Grace of Ormond negotiated; and no care was
+omitted on his part to keep me out of the secret.  The reason of which,
+as far as I am able to guess at, shall be explained to you by-and-by.  I
+might very justly have taken this proceeding ill, and the duke will not
+be able to find in my whole conduct towards him anything like it; I
+protest to you very sincerely I was not in the least moved at it.
+
+He advanced not a step in his business with these sham Ministers, and yet
+imagined that he got daily ground.  I made no progress with the true
+ones, but I saw it.  These, however, were not our only difficulties.  We
+lay under another, which came from your side, and which embarrassed us
+more.  The first hindered us from working forward to our point of view,
+but the second took all point of view from us.
+
+A paper was sent into England just before the death of the King of
+France, which had been drawn by me at Chaville in concert with the Dukes
+of Ormond and Berwick, and with Monsieur de Torcy.  This paper was an
+answer to the memorial received from thence.  The state of this country
+was truly represented in it: the difference was fixed between what had
+been asked, and what might be expected from France; and upon the whole it
+was demanded what our friends would do, and what they would have us to
+do.  The reply to this came through the French Secretary of State to our
+hands.  They declared themselves unable to say anything till they should
+see what turn affairs would take on so great an event as the death of the
+King, the report of which had reached them.
+
+Such a declaration shut our mouths and tied our hands.  I confess I knew
+neither how to solicit, nor what to solicit; this last message suspending
+the project on which we had acted before, and which I kept as an
+instruction constantly before my eyes.  It seemed to me uncertain whether
+you intended to go on, or whether your design was to stifle, as much as
+possible, all past transactions; to lie perfectly still; to throw upon
+the Court the odium of having given a false alarm; and to wait till new
+accidents at home, and a more favourable conjuncture abroad, might tempt
+you to resume the enterprise.  Perhaps this would have been the wisest
+game you could have played: but then you should have concerted it with us
+who acted for you here.  You intended no such thing, as appeared
+afterwards: and therefore those who acted for the party at London,
+whoever they were, must be deemed inexcusable for leaving things on the
+foot of this message, and giving us no advice fit to be depended upon for
+many weeks.  Whilst preparations were to be made, and the work was to be
+set a-going by assistance from hence, you might reasonably expect to hear
+from us, and to be determined by us: but when all hopes of this kind
+seemed to be gone, it was your part to determine us; and we could take no
+resolution here but that of conforming ourselves to whatever should come
+prescribed from England.
+
+Whilst we were in this condition, the most desperate that can be
+imagined, we began to receive verbal messages from you that no more time
+was to be lost, and that the Chevalier should come away.  No man was, I
+believe, ever so embarrassed as I found myself at that time.  I could not
+imagine that you would content yourselves by loose verbal messages, after
+all that had happened, to call us over; and I knew by experience how
+little such messages are to be depended on.  For soon after I engaged in
+these affairs, a monk arrived at Bar, despatched, as he affirmed, by the
+Duke of Ormond, in whose name he insisted that the Chevalier should
+hasten into Britain, and that nothing but his presence was wanting to
+place the crown on his head.  The fellow delivered his errand so
+positively, and so circumstantially, that the resolution was taken at Bar
+to set out, and my rendezvous to join the Chevalier was appointed me.
+This method to fetch a King, with as little ceremony as one would invite
+a friend to supper, appeared somewhat odd to me, who was then very new in
+these affairs.  But when I came to talk with the man, for by good luck he
+had been sent for from Bar to Paris, I easily discerned that he had no
+such commission as he pretended to, and that he acted of his own head.  I
+presumed to oppose the taking any resolution upon his word, though he was
+a monk: and soon after we knew from the Duke of Ormond himself that he
+had never sent him.
+
+This example made me cautious; but that which determined my opinion was,
+that I could never imagine, without supposing you all run mad, that the
+same men who judged this attempt unripe for execution, unless supported
+by regular troops from France, or at least by all the other assistances
+which are enumerated above, while the design was much more secret than at
+present; when the King had no fleet at sea, nor more than eight thousand
+men dispersed over the whole island; when we had the good wishes of the
+French Court on our side, and were sure of some particular assistances,
+and of a general connivance; that the same men, I say, should press for
+making it now without any other preparation, when we had neither money,
+arms, ammunition, nor a single company of foot; when the Government of
+England was on its guard, national troops were raised, foreign forces
+sent for, and France, like all the rest of the Continent, against us.  I
+could not conceive such a strange combination of accidents as should make
+the necessity of acting increase gradually upon us as the means of doing
+so were taken from us.
+
+Upon the whole matter, my opinion was, and I did not observe the Duke of
+Ormond to differ from me, that we should wait till we heard from you in
+such a manner as might assure us of what you intended to do yourselves,
+and of what you expected from us; and that in the meanwhile we should go
+as far as the little money which we had, and the little favour which was
+shown us would allow, in getting some embarkations ready on the coast.
+
+Sir George Byng had come into the road of Havre, and had demanded by name
+several ships which belonged to us to be given up to him.  The Regent did
+not think fit to let him have the ships; but he ordered them to be
+unloaded, and their cargoes were put into the King’s magazines.  We were
+in no condition to repair the loss; and therefore when I mention
+embarkations, you will please to understand nothing more than vessels to
+transport the Pretender’s person and the persons of those who should go
+over with him.  This was all we could do, and this was not neglected.
+
+We were thus employed when a gentleman arrived from Scotland to represent
+the state of that country, and to require a definitive answer from the
+Chevalier whether he would have the insurrection to be made immediately,
+which they apprehended they might not be able to make at all if they were
+obliged to defer it much longer.  This gentleman was sent instantly back
+again, and was directed to let the persons he came from know that the
+Chevalier was desirous to have the rising of his friends in England and
+Scotland so adjusted that they might mutually assist each other and
+distract the enemy; that he had not received a final answer from his
+friends in England, but that he was in daily expectation of it; that it
+was very much to be wished that all attempts in Scotland could be
+suspended till such time as the English were ready; but that if the Scots
+were so pressed that they must either submit or rise immediately, he was
+of opinion they should rise, and he would make the best of his way to
+them.
+
+What this forwardness in the Scots and this uncertainty and backwardness
+in the English must produce, it was not hard to foresee; and, therefore,
+that I might neglect nothing in my power to prevent any false measures—as
+I was conscious to myself that I had neglected nothing to promote true
+ones—I despatched a gentleman to London, where I supposed the Earl of Mar
+to be, some days before the message I have just spoken of was sent to
+Scotland.  I desired him to make my compliments to Lord Mar, and to tell
+him from me that I understood it to be his sense, as well as the sense of
+all our friends, that Scotland could do nothing effectually without the
+concurrence of England, and that England would not stir without
+assistance from abroad; that he might assure himself no such assistance
+could be depended upon; and that I begged of him to make the inference
+from these propositions.  The gentleman went; but upon his arrival at
+London he found that the Earl of Mar was already set out to draw the
+Highlanders into arms.  He communicated his message to a person of
+confidence, who undertook to send it after his lordship; and this was the
+utmost which either he or I could do in such a conjuncture.
+
+You were now visibly departed from the very scheme which you had sent us
+over, and from all the principles which had been ever laid down.  I did
+what I could to keep up my own spirit, as well as the spirits of the
+Chevalier, and of all those with whom I was in correspondence: I
+endeavoured even to deceive myself.  I could not remedy the mischief, and
+I was resolved to see the conclusion of the perilous adventure; but I own
+to you that I thought then, and that I have not changed my opinion since,
+that such measures as these would not be pursued by any reasonable man in
+the most common affairs of life.  It was with the utmost astonishment
+that I saw them pursued in the conduct of an enterprise which had for its
+object nothing less than the disposition of crowns, and for the means of
+bringing it about nothing less than a civil war.
+
+Impatient that we heard nothing from England, when we expected every
+moment to hear that the war was begun in Scotland, the Duke of Ormond and
+I resolved to send a person of confidence to London.  We instructed him
+to repeat to you the former accounts which we had sent over, to let you
+know how destitute the Chevalier was either of actual support or even of
+reasonable hopes, and to desire that you would determine whether he
+should go to Scotland or throw himself on some part of the English coast.
+This person was further instructed to tell you that, the Chevalier being
+ready to take any resolution at a moment’s warning, you might depend on
+his setting out the instant he received your answer; and, therefore, that
+to save time, if your intention was to rise, you would do well to act
+immediately, on the assurance that the plan you prescribed, be it what it
+would, should be exactly complied with.  We took this resolution the
+rather because one of the packets, which had been prepared in cypher to
+give you an account of things, which had been put above three weeks
+before into Monsieur de Torcy’s hands, and which by consequence we
+thought to be in yours, was by this time sent back to me by this Minister
+(I think, open), with an excuse that he durst not take upon him to
+forward it.
+
+The person despatched to London returned very soon to us, and the answer
+he brought was, that since affairs grew daily worse, and could not mend
+by delay, our friends in England had resolved to declare immediately, and
+that they would be ready to join the Chevalier on his landing; that his
+person would be as safe there as in Scotland, and that in every other
+respect it was better that he should land in England; that they had used
+their utmost endeavours, and that they hoped the western counties were in
+a good posture to receive him.  To this was added a general indication of
+the place he should come to, as near to Plymouth as possible.
+
+You must agree that this was not the answer of men who knew what they
+were about.  A little more precision was necessary in dictating a message
+which was to have such consequences, and especially since the gentleman
+could not fail to acquaint the persons he spoke with that the Chevalier
+was not able to carry men enough to secure him from being taken up even
+by the first constable.  Notwithstanding this, the Duke of Ormond set out
+from Paris and the Chevalier from Bar.  Some persons were sent to the
+North of England and others to London to give notice that they were both
+on their way.  Their routes were so ordered that the Duke of Ormond was
+to sail from the coast of Normandy some days before the Chevalier arrived
+at St. Malo, to which place the duke was to send immediate notice of his
+landing; and two gentlemen acquainted with the country, and perfectly
+well known to all our friends in those parts, were despatched before,
+that the people of Devonshire and Somersetshire, who were, we concluded,
+in arms, might be apprised of the signals which were to be made from the
+ships, and might be ready to receive the duke.
+
+On the coast of France, and before his embarkation, the duke heard that
+several of our principal friends had been seized immediately after the
+person who came last from them had left London, that the others were all
+dispersed, and that the consternation was universal.  He embarked,
+notwithstanding this melancholy news, and, supported by nothing but the
+firmness of his temper, he went over to the place appointed; he did more
+than his part, and he found that our friends had done less than theirs.
+One of the gentlemen who had passed over before him, and had traversed
+part of the country, joined him on the coast, and assured him that there
+was not the least room to expect a rising; in a word, he was refused a
+night’s lodging in a country which we had been told was in a good posture
+to receive the Chevalier, and where the duke expected that multitudes
+would repair to him.
+
+He returned to the coast of Brittany after this uncomfortable expedition,
+where the Chevalier arrived about the same time from Lorraine.  What his
+Grace proposed by the second attempt, which he made as soon as the vessel
+could be refitted, to land in the same part of the island, I profess
+myself to be ignorant.  I wrote him my opinion at the time, and I have
+always thought that the storm in which he had like to have been cast
+away, and which forced him back to the French coast, saved him from a
+much greater peril—that of perishing in an attempt as full of extravagant
+rashness, and as void of all reasonable meaning, as any of those
+adventures which have rendered the hero of La Mancha immortal.
+
+The Chevalier had now but one of these two things left him to do: one was
+to return to Bar; the other was to go to Scotland, where there were
+people in arms for him.  He took this last resolution.  He left Brittany,
+where he had as many Ministers as there were people about him, and where
+he was eternally teased with noisy disputes about what was to be done in
+circumstances in which no reasonable thing could be done.  He sent to
+have a vessel got ready for him at Dunkirk, and he crossed the country as
+privately as he could.
+
+Whilst all these things passed I remained at Paris to try if by any means
+some assistance might be at last procured, without which it was evident,
+even to those who flattered themselves the most, that the game was up.
+
+No sooner was the Duke of Ormond gone from Paris on the design which I
+have mentioned, and Mrs. Trant, who had accompanied him part of the way,
+returned, but I was sent for to a little house at Madrid, in the Bois de
+Boulogne, where she lived with Mademoiselle de Chaussery, the ancient
+gentlewoman with whom the Duke of Orleans had placed her.  These two
+persons opened to me what had passed whilst the Duke of Ormond was here,
+and the hopes they had of drawing the Regent into all the measures
+necessary to support the attempts which were making in favour of the
+Chevalier.
+
+By what they told me at first I saw that they had been trusted, and by
+what passed in the course of my treating with them it appeared that they
+had the access which they pretended to.  All which I had been able to do
+by proper persons and in proper methods, since the King of France’s
+death, amounting to little or nothing, I resolved, at last, to try what
+was to be done by this indirect way.  I put myself under the conduct of
+these female managers, and without having the same dependence on them as
+his Grace of Ormond had, I pushed their credit and their power as far as
+they reached during the time I continued to see them.  I met with
+smoother language and greater hopes than had been given me hitherto.  A
+note signed by the Regent, supposed to be written to a woman, but which
+was to be explained to be intended for the Earl of Mar, was put into my
+hands to be sent to Scotland.  I took a copy of it, which you may see at
+the end of these papers.  When Sir John Areskine came to press for
+succour, the Regent was prevailed upon by these women to see him; but he
+carried nothing real back with him except a quantity of gold, part of the
+money which we had drawn from Spain, and which was lost, with the vessel,
+in a very odd manner, on the Scotch coast.  The Duke of Ormond had been
+promised seven or eight thousand arms, which were drawn out of the
+magazines, and said to be lodged, I think, at Compiègne.  I used my
+utmost efforts that these arms might be carried forward to the coast, and
+I undertook for their transportation, but all was in vain, so that the
+likelihood of bringing anything to effect in time appeared to me no
+greater than I had found it before I entered into this intrigue.
+
+I soon grew tired of a commerce which nothing but success could render
+tolerable, and resolved to be no longer amused by the pretences which
+were daily repeated to me, that the Regent had entertained personal
+prejudices against me, and that he was insensibly and by degrees to be
+dipped in our measures; that both these things required time, but that
+they would certainly be brought about, and that we should then be able to
+answer all the expectations of the English and the Scotch.  The first of
+these pretences contained a fact which I could hardly persuade myself to
+be true, because I knew very certainly that I had never given His Royal
+Highness the least occasion for such prejudices; the second was a work
+which might spin out into a great and uncertain length.  I took my
+resolution to drive what related to myself to an immediate explanation,
+and what related to others to an immediate decision; not to suffer any
+excuse for doing nothing to be founded on my conduct, nor the salvation,
+if I could hinder it, of so many gallant men as were in arms in Scotland,
+to rest on the success of such womanish projects.  I shall tell you what
+I did on the first head now, and what I did on the second, hereafter, in
+its proper place.
+
+The fact which it was said the Regent laid to my charge was a
+correspondence with Lord Stair, and having been one night at his house
+from whence I did not retire till three in the morning.  As soon as I got
+hold of this I desired the Marshal of Berwick to go to him.  The Marshal
+told him, from me, that I had been extremely concerned to hear in general
+that I lay under his displeasure; that a story, which it was said he
+believed, had been related to me; that I expected the justice, which he
+could deny to no man, of having the accusation proved, in which case I
+was contented to pass for the last of humankind, or of being justified if
+it could not be proved.  He answered that such a story had been related
+to him by such persons as he thought would not have deceived him; that he
+had been since convinced that it was false, and that I should be
+satisfied of his regard for me; but that he must own he was very uneasy
+to find that I, who could apply to him through the Marshal d’Huxelles,
+could choose to treat with Mrs. Trant and the rest; for he named all the
+cabal, except his secretary, whom I had never met at Mademoiselle
+Chaussery’s.  He added that these people teased him, at my instigation,
+to death, and that they were not fit to be trusted with any business.  He
+applied to some of them the severest epithets.  The Marshal of Berwick
+replied that he was sure I should receive the whole of what he had been
+pleased to say with the greatest satisfaction; that I had treated with
+those persons much against my will; and, finally, that if his Royal
+Highness would not employ them he was sure I would never apply to them.
+In a conversation which I had not long after with him he spoke to me in
+much the same terms as he had done to the Marshal.  I went from him very
+ill edified as to his intentions of doing anything in favour of the
+Chevalier; but I carried away with me this satisfaction, that he had
+assigned me, from his own mouth, the person through whom I should make my
+applications to him, and through whom I should depend on receiving his
+answers; that he had disavowed all the little politic clubs, and had
+commanded me to have no more to do with them.
+
+Before I resume the thread of my narration give me leave to make some
+reflection upon what I have been last saying to you.  When I met with the
+Duke of Ormond at his return from the coast, he thought himself obliged
+to say something to excuse his keeping me out of a secret which during
+his absence I had been let into.  His excuse was that the Regent had
+exacted from him that I should know nothing of the matter.  You will
+observe that the account which I have given you seems to contradict this
+assertion of his Grace, since it is hard to suppose that if the Regent
+had exacted that I should be kept out of the secret, these women would
+have dared to have let me into it, and since it is still harder to
+suppose that the Regent would make this express condition with the Duke
+of Ormond, and the moment the duke’s back was turned would suffer these
+women to tease him from me and to bring me answers from him.  I am,
+however, far from taxing the duke with affirming an untruth.  I believe
+the Regent did make such a condition with him; and I will tell you how I
+understand all this little management, which will explain a great deal to
+you.  This Prince, with wit and valour, has joined all the irresolution
+of temper possible, and is, perhaps, the man in the world the least
+capable of saying “no” to your face.  From hence it happened that these
+women, like multitudes of other people, forced him to say and do enough
+to give them the air of having credit with him and of being trusted by
+him.  This drew in the Duke of Ormond, who is not, I daresay, as yet
+undeceived.  The Regent never intended from the first to do anything,
+even indirectly, in favour of the Jacobite cause.  His interest was
+plainly on the other side, and he saw it.  But then the same weakness in
+his character carried him, as it would have done his great-uncle Gaston
+in the same case, to keep measures with the Chevalier.  His
+double-trimming character prevailed on him to talk with the Duke of
+Ormond, but it carried him no farther.  I question not but he did, on
+this occasion, what you must have observed many men to do: we not only
+endeavour to impose on the world, but even on ourselves; we disguise our
+weakness, and work up in our minds an opinion that the measure which we
+fall into by the natural or habitual imperfection of our character is the
+effect of a principle of prudence or of some other virtue.  Thus the
+Regent, who saw the Duke of Ormond because he could not resist the
+importunity of Olive Trant, and who gave hopes to the duke because he can
+refuse nobody, made himself believe that it was a great strain of policy
+to blow up the fire and to keep Britain embroiled.  I am persuaded that I
+do not err in judging that he thought in this manner, and here I fix the
+reason of his excluding me out of the commerce which he had with the Duke
+of Ormond, of his affecting a personal dislike of me, and of his avoiding
+any correspondence with me upon these matters, till I forced myself in a
+manner upon him, and he could not keep me any longer at a distance
+without departing from his first principle—that of keeping measures with
+everybody.  He then threw me, or let me slide if you will, into the hands
+of these women; and when he found that I pressed him hard that way, too,
+he took me out of their hands and put me back again into the proper
+channel of business, where I had not been long, as you will see
+by-and-by, before the scene of amusement was finished.
+
+Sir John Areskine told me when he came from the first audience that he
+had of his Royal Highness, that he put him in mind of the encouragement
+which he had given the Earl of Mar to take arms.  I never heard anything
+of this kind but what Sir John let drop to me.  If the fact be true, you
+see that the Scotch general had been amused by him with a witness.  The
+English general was so in his turn; and while this was doing, the Regent
+might think it best to have him to himself.  Four eyes comprehend more
+objects than two, and I was a little better acquainted with the
+characters of people, and the mass of the country, than the duke, though
+this Court had been at first a strange country to me in comparison of the
+former.
+
+An infinity of little circumstances concurred to make me form this
+opinion, some of which are better felt than explained, and many of which
+are not present to my memory.  That which had the greatest weight with
+me, and which is, I think, decisive, I will mention.  At the very time
+when it is pretended that the Regent treated with the Duke of Ormond on
+the express condition that I should know nothing of the matter, two
+persons of the first rank and greatest credit in this Court, when I made
+the most pressing instances to them in favour of the Chevalier, threw out
+in conversation to me that I should attach myself to the Duke of Orleans,
+that in my circumstances I might want him, and that he might have
+occasion for me.  Something was intimated of pensions and establishment,
+and of making my peace at home.  I would not understand this language,
+because I would not break with the people who held it: and when they saw
+that I would not take the hints, they ceased to give them.
+
+I fancy that you see by this time the motives of the Regent’s conduct.  I
+am not, I confess, able to explain to you those of the Duke of Ormond’s;
+I cannot so much as guess at them.  When he came into France, I was
+careful to show him all the friendship and all the respect possible.  My
+friends were his, my purse was his, and even my bed was his.  I went
+further; I did all those things which touch most sensibly people who have
+been used to pomp.  I made my court to him, and haunted his levee with
+assiduity.  In return to this behaviour—which was the pure effect of my
+goodwill, and which no duty that I owed his Grace, no obligation that I
+had to him, imposed upon me—I have great reason to suspect that he went
+at least half way in all which was said or done against me.  He threw
+himself blindly into the snare which was laid for him; and instead of
+hindering, as he and I in concert might have done, those affairs from
+languishing in the manner they did several months, he furnished this
+Court with an excuse for not treating with me, till it was too late to
+play even a saving game; and he neither drove the Regent to assist the
+Chevalier, nor to declare that he would not assist him; though it was
+fatal to the cause in general, and to the Scotch in particular, not to
+bring one of the two about.
+
+It was Christmas 1715 before the Chevalier sailed for Scotland.  The
+battle of Dunblain had been fought, the business of Preston was over:
+there remained not the least room to expect any commotion in his favour
+among the English; and many of the Scotch who had declared for him began
+to grow cool in the cause.  No prospect of success could engage him in
+this expedition: but it was become necessary for his reputation.  The
+Scotch on one side spared not to reproach him, I think unjustly, for his
+delay; and the French on the other were extremely eager to have him gone.
+Some of those who knew little of British affairs imagined that his
+presence would produce miraculous effects.  You must not be surprised at
+this.  As near neighbours as we are, ninety-nine in an hundred among the
+French are as little acquainted with the inside of our island as with
+that of Japan.  Others of them were uneasy to see him skulking about in
+France, and to be told of it every hour by the Earl of Stair.  Others,
+again, imagined that he might do their business by going into Scotland,
+though he should not do his own: this is, they flattered themselves that
+he might keep a war for some time alive, which would employ the whole
+attention of our Government; and for the event of which they had very
+little concern.  Unable from their natural temper, as well as their
+habits, to be true to any principle, they thought and acted in this
+manner, whilst they affected the greatest friendship to the King, and
+whilst they really did desire to enter into new and more intimate
+engagements with him.  Whilst the Pretender continued in France they
+could neither avow him, nor favour his cause: if he once set his foot on
+Scotch ground, they gave hopes of indirect assistance; and if he could
+maintain himself in any corner of the island, they could look upon him,
+it was said, as a king.  This was their language to us.  To the British
+Minister they denied, they forswore, they renounced; and yet the man of
+the best head in all their councils, being asked by Lord Stair what they
+intended to do, answered, before he was aware, that they pretended to be
+neuters.  I leave you to judge how this slip was taken up.
+
+As soon as I received advice that the Chevalier was sailed from Dunkirk,
+I renewed, I redoubled all my applications.  I neglected no means, I
+forgot no argument which my understanding could suggest to me.  What the
+Duke of Ormond rested upon, you have seen already.  And I doubt very much
+whether Lord Mar, if he had been here in my place, would have been able
+to employ measures more effectual than those which I made use of.  I may,
+without any imputation of arrogance, compare myself on this occasion with
+his lordship, since there was nothing in the management of this affair
+above my degree of capacity; nothing equal, either in extent or
+difficulty, to the business which he was a spectator of, and which I
+carried on when we were Secretaries of State together under the late
+Queen.
+
+The King of France, who was not able to furnish the Pretender with money
+himself, had written some time before his death to his grandson, and had
+obtained a promise of four hundred thousand crowns from the King of
+Spain.  A small part of this sum had been received by the Queen’s
+Treasurer at St. Germains, and had been either sent to Scotland or
+employed to defray the expenses which were daily making on the coast.  I
+pressed the Spanish Ambassador at Paris; I solicited, by Lawless,
+Alberoni at Madrid, and I found another more private and more promising
+way of applying to him.  I took care to have a number of officers picked
+out of the Irish troops which serve in that country; their routes were
+given them, and I sent a ship to receive and transport them.  The money
+came in so slowly and in such trifling sums that it turned to little
+account, and the officers were on their way when the Chevalier returned
+from Scotland.
+
+In the summer endeavours had been used to prevail on the King of Sweden
+to transport from Gottenburg the troops he had in that neighbourhood into
+Scotland or into the North of England.  He had excused himself, not
+because he disliked the proposition, which, on the contrary, he thought
+agreeable to his interest, but for reasons of another kind.  First,
+because the troops at hand for this service consisted in horse, not in
+foot, which had been asked, and which were alone proper for such an
+expedition.  Secondly, because a declaration of this sort might turn the
+Protestant princes of the Empire, from whose offices he had still some
+prospect of assistance, against him.  And thirdly, because although he
+knew that the King of Great Britain was his enemy, yet they were not in
+war together, nor had the latter acted yet awhile openly enough against
+him to justify such a rupture.  At the time I am speaking of, these
+reasons were removed by the King of Sweden’s being beat out of the Empire
+by the little consequence which his management of the Protestant princes
+was to him, and by the declaration of war which the King, as Elector of
+Hanover, made.  I took up this negotiation therefore again.  The Regent
+appeared to come into it.  He spoke fair to the Baron de Spar, who
+pressed him on his side as I pressed him on mine, and promised, besides
+the arrears of the subsidy due to the Swedes, an immediate advance of
+fifty thousand crowns for the enterprise on Britain.  He kept the officer
+who was to be despatched I know not how long booted; sometimes on
+pretence that in the low state of his credit he could not find bills of
+exchange for the sum, and sometimes on other pretences, and by these
+delays he evaded his promise.  The French were very frank in declaring
+that they could give us no money, and that they would give us no troops.
+Arms, ammunition, and connivance they made us hope for.  The latter, in
+some degree, we might have had perhaps; but to what purpose was it to
+connive, when by a multitude of little tricks they avoided furnishing us
+with arms and ammunition, and when they knew that we were utterly unable
+to furnish ourselves with them?  I had formed the design of engaging
+French privateers in the Pretender’s service.  They were to have carried
+whatever we should have had to send to any part of Britain in their first
+voyage, and after that to have cruised under his commission.  I had
+actually agreed for some, and it was in my power to have made the same
+bargains with others.  Sweden on one side and Scotland on the other would
+have afforded them retreats.  And if the war had been kept up in any part
+of the mountains, I conceive the execution of this design would have been
+of the greatest advantage to the Pretender.  It failed because no other
+part of the work went on.  He was not above six weeks in his Scotch
+expedition, and these were the things I endeavoured to bring to bear in
+his absence.  I had no great opinion of my success before he went; but
+when he had made the last step which it was in his power to make, I
+resolved to suffer neither him nor the Scotch to be any longer bubbles of
+their own credulity and of the scandalous artifice of this Court.  It
+would be tedious to enter into a longer narrative of all the useless
+pains I took.  To conclude, therefore; in a conversation which I had with
+the M. d’Huxelles, I took occasion to declare that I would not be the
+instrument of amusing the Scotch, and that, since I was able to do them
+no other service, I would at least inform them that they must flatter
+themselves no longer with hopes of succour from France.  I added that I
+would send them vessels which, with those already on the coast of
+Scotland, might serve to bring off the Pretender, the Earl of Mar, and as
+many others as possible.  The Marshal approved my resolution, and advised
+me to execute it as the only thing which was left to do.  On this
+occasion he showed no reserve, he was very explicit; and yet in this very
+point of time the promise of an order was obtained, or pretended to be
+obtained, from the Regent for delivering those stores of arms and
+ammunition which belonged to the Chevalier, and which had been put into
+the French magazines when Sir George Byng came to Havre.  Castel Blanco
+is a Spaniard who married a daughter of Lord Melford, and who under that
+title set up for a meddler in English business.  I cannot justly tell
+whether the honour of obtaining this promise was ascribed to him, to the
+Junto in the Bois de Boulogne, or to any one else.  I suppose they all
+assumed a share of the merit.  The project was that these stores should
+be delivered to Castel Blanco; that he should enter into a recognisance
+to carry them to Spain, and from thence to the West Indies; that I should
+provide a vessel for this purpose, which he should appear to hire or buy;
+and that when she was at sea she should sail directly for Scotland.  You
+cannot believe that I reckoned much on the effect of this order, but
+accustomed to concur in measures the inutility of which I saw evidently
+enough, I concurred in this likewise.  The necessary care was taken, and
+in a fortnight’s time the ship was ready to sail, and no suspicion of her
+belonging to the Chevalier or of her destination was gone abroad.
+
+As this event made no alteration in my opinion, it made none in the
+despatches which I prepared and sent to Scotland.  In them I gave an
+account of what was in negotiation.  I explained to him what might be
+hoped for in time if he was able to maintain himself in the mountains
+without the succours he demanded from France.  But from France I told him
+plainly that it was in vain to expect the least part of them.  In short,
+I concealed nothing from him.  This was all I could do to put the
+Chevalier and his council in a condition to judge what measures to take;
+but these despatches never came to his hands.  He was sailed from
+Scotland just before the gentleman whom I sent arrived on the coast.  He
+landed at Graveline about the 22nd of February, and the first orders he
+gave were to stop all the vessels which were going on his account to the
+country from whence he came.
+
+I saw him the morning after his arrival at St. Germains, and he received
+me with open arms.  I had been, as soon as we heard of his return, to
+acquaint the French Court with it.  They were not a little uneasy; and
+the first thing which the M. d’Huxelles said to me upon it was that the
+Chevalier ought to proceed to Bar with all the diligence possible, and to
+take possession of his former asylum before the Duke of Lorraine had time
+to desire him to look out for a residence somewhere else.  Nothing more
+was meant by this proposal than to get him out of the dominions of France
+immediately.  I was not in my mind averse to it for other reasons.
+Nothing could be more disadvantageous to him than to be obliged to pass
+the Alps, or to reside in the Papal territory on this side of them.
+Avignon was already named for his retreat in common conversation, and I
+know not whether from the time he left Scotland he ever thought of any
+other.  I imagined that by surprising the Duke of Lorraine we should
+furnish that Prince with an excuse to the King and to the Emperor; that
+we might draw the matter into length, and gain time to negotiate some
+other retreat than that of Avignon for the Chevalier.  The duke’s
+goodwill there was no room to doubt of, and by what the Prince of
+Vaudemont told me at Paris some time afterwards I am apt to think we
+should have succeeded.  In all events, it could not be wrong to try every
+measure, and the Pretender would have gone to Avignon with much better
+grace when he had done, in the sight of the world, all he could to avoid
+it.
+
+I found him in no disposition to make such haste; he had a mind, on the
+contrary, to stay some time at St. Germains, and in the neighbourhood of
+Paris, and to have a private meeting with the Regent.  He sent me back to
+Paris to solicit this meeting.  I wrote, I spoke, to the Marshal
+d’Huxelles; I did my best to serve him in his own way.  The Marshal
+answered me by word of mouth and by letter; he refused me by both.  I
+remember he added this circumstance: that he found the Regent in bed, and
+acquainted him with what the Chevalier desired; that the Regent rose up
+in a passion, said that the things which were asked were puerilities, and
+swore that he would not see him.  I returned without having been able to
+succeed in my commission; and I confess I thought the want of success on
+this occasion no great misfortune.
+
+It was two or three o’clock on the Sunday or Monday morning when I parted
+from the Pretender.  He acquiesced in the determination of the Regent,
+and declared that he would instantly set out for Lorraine; his trunks
+were packed, his chaise was ordered to be at the door at five, and I sent
+to Paris to acquaint the Minister that he was gone.  He asked me how soon
+I should be able to follow him, gave me commissions for some things which
+he desired I should bring after him, and, in a word, no Italian ever
+embraced the man he was going to stab with greater show of affection and
+confidence.
+
+Instead of taking post for Lorraine he went to the little house in the
+Bois de Boulogne where his female Ministers resided; and there he
+continued lurking for several days, and pleasing himself with the air of
+mystery and business, whilst the only real business which he should have
+had at that time lay neglected.  He saw the Spanish and Swedish Ministers
+in this place.  I cannot tell, for I never thought it worth asking,
+whether he saw the Duke of Orleans; possibly he might.  To have been
+teased into such a step, which signified nothing, and which gave the
+cabal an air of credit and importance, is agreeable enough to the levity
+of his Royal Highness’s character.
+
+The Thursday following, the Duke of Ormond came to see me, and after the
+compliment of telling me that he believed I should be surprised at the
+message he brought, he put into my hands a note to himself and a little
+scrip of paper directed to me, and drawn in the style of a justice of
+peace’s warrant.  They were both in the Chevalier’s handwriting, and they
+were dated on the Tuesday, in order to make me believe that they had been
+written on the road and sent back to the duke; his Grace dropped in our
+conversation with great dexterity all the insinuations proper to confirm
+me in this opinion.  I knew at this time his master was not gone, so that
+he gave me two very risible scenes, which are frequently to be met with
+when some people meddle in business; I mean that of seeing a man labour
+with a great deal of awkward artifice to make a secret of a nothing, and
+that of seeing yourself taken for a bubble when you know as much of the
+matter as he who thinks that he imposes on you.
+
+I cannot recollect precisely the terms of the two papers.  I remember
+that the kingly laconic style of one of them, and the expression of
+having no further occasion for my service, made me smile.  The other was
+an order to give up the papers in my office, all which might have been
+contained in a letter-case of a moderate size.  I gave the duke the Seals
+and some papers which I could readily come at.  Some others—and, indeed,
+all such as I had not destroyed—I sent afterwards to the Chevalier; and I
+took care to convey to him by a safe hand several of his letters which it
+would have been very improper the duke should have seen.  I am surprised
+that he did not reflect on the consequence of my obeying his order
+literally.  It depended on me to have shown his general what an opinion
+the Chevalier had of his capacity.  I scorned the trick, and would not
+appear piqued when I was far from being angry.  As I gave up without
+scruple all the papers which remained in my hands, because I was
+determined never to make use of them, so I confess to you that I took a
+sort of pride in never asking for those of mine which were in the
+Pretender’s hands; I contented myself with making the duke understand how
+little need there was to get rid of a man in this manner who had made the
+bargain which I had done at my engagement, and with taking this first
+opportunity to declare that I would never more have to do with the
+Pretender or his cause.
+
+That I might avoid being questioned and quoted in the most curious and
+the most babbling town in the world, I related what had passed to three
+or four of my friends, and hardly stirred abroad during a fortnight out
+of a little lodging which very few people knew of.  At the end of this
+term the Marshal of Berwick came to see me, and asked me what I meant to
+confine myself to my chamber when my name was trumpeted about in all the
+companies of Paris, and the most infamous stories were spread concerning
+me.  This was the first notice I had, and it was soon followed by others.
+I appeared immediately in the world, and found there was hardly a
+scurrilous tongue which had not been let loose on my subject; and that
+those persons whom the Duke of Ormond and Earl of Mar must influence, or
+might silence, were the loudest in defaming me.
+
+Particular instances wherein I had failed were cited; and as it was the
+fashion for every Jacobite to affect being in the secret, you might have
+found a multitude of vouchers to facts which, if they had been true,
+could in the nature of them be known to very few persons.
+
+This method of beating down the reputation of a man by noise and
+impudence imposed on the world at first, convinced people who were not
+acquainted with me, and staggered even my friends.  But it ceased in a
+few days to have any effect against me.  The malice was too gross to pass
+upon reflection.  These stories died away almost as fast as they were
+published, for this very reason, because they were particular.
+
+They gave out, for instance, that I had taken to my own use a very great
+sum of the Chevalier’s money, when it was notorious that I had spent a
+great sum of my own in his service, and never would be obliged to him for
+a farthing, in which case, I believe, I was single.  Upon this head it
+was easy to appeal to a very honest gentleman, the Queen’s Treasurer at
+St. Germains, through whose hands, and not through mine, went the very
+little money which the Chevalier had.
+
+They gave out that whilst he was in Scotland he never heard from me,
+though it was notorious that I sent him no less than five expresses
+during the six weeks which he consumed in this expedition.  It was easy,
+on this head, to appeal to the persons to whom my despatches had been
+committed.
+
+These lies, and many others of the same sort, which were founded on
+particular facts, were disproved by particular facts, and had not time—at
+least at Paris—to make any impression.  But the principal crime with
+which they charged me then, and the only one which since that time they
+have insisted upon, is of another nature.  This part of their accusation
+is general, and it cannot be refuted without doing what I have done
+above, deducing several facts, comparing these facts together, and
+reasoning upon them; nay, that which is worse is, that it cannot be fully
+refuted without the mention of some facts which, in my present
+circumstances, it would not be very prudent, though I should think it
+very lawful, for me to divulge.  You see that I mean the starving the war
+in Scotland, which it is pretended might have been supported, and might
+have succeeded, too, if I had procured the succours which were asked—nay,
+if I had sent a little powder.  This the Jacobites who affect moderation
+and candour shrug their shoulders at: they are sorry for it, but Lord
+Bolingbroke can never wash himself clean of this guilt; for these
+succours might have been obtained, and a proof that they might is that
+they were so by others.  These people leave the cause of this
+mismanagement doubtful between my treachery and my want of capacity.  The
+Pretender, with all the false charity and real malice of one who sets up
+for devotion, attributes all his misfortunes to my negligence.
+
+The letters which were written by my secretary, above a year ago, into
+England; the marginal notes which have been made since to the letter from
+Avignon; and what is said above, have set this affair in so clear a
+light, that whoever examines, with a fair intention, must feel the truth,
+and be convinced by it.  I cannot, however, forbear to make some
+observations on the same subject here.  It is even necessary that I
+should do so, in the design of making this discourse the foundation of my
+justification to the Tories at present, and to the whole world in time.
+
+There is nothing which my enemies apprehend so much as my justification:
+and they have reason.  But they may comfort themselves with this
+reflection—that it will be a misfortune which will accompany me to my
+grave, that I suffered a chain of accidents to draw me into such measures
+and such company; that I have been obliged to defend myself against such
+accusations and such accusers; that by associating with so much folly and
+so much knavery I am become the victim of both; that I was distressed by
+the former, when the latter would have been less grievous to me, since it
+is much better in business to be yoked to knaves than fools; and that I
+put into their hands the means of loading me, like the scape-goat, with
+all the evil consequences of their folly.
+
+In the first letters which I received from the Earl of Mar he wrote for
+arms, for ammunition, for money, for officers, and all things frankly, as
+if these things had been ready, and I had engaged to supply him with
+them, before he set up the standard at the Brae of Mar; whereas our
+condition could not be unknown to his lordship; and you have seen that I
+did all I could to prevent his reckoning on any assistance from hence.
+As our hopes at this Court decreased, his lordship rose in his demands;
+and at the time when it was visible that the Regent intended nothing less
+than even privately and indirectly to support the Scotch, the Pretender
+and the Earl of Mar wrote for regular forces and a train of artillery,
+which was in effect to insist that France should enter into a war for
+them.  I might, in answer to the first instances, have asked Lord Mar
+what he did in Scotland, and what he meant by drawing his countrymen into
+a war at this time, or at least upon this foot?  He who had dictated not
+long before a memorial wherein it was asserted that to have a prospect of
+succeeding in this enterprise there must be a universal insurrection, and
+that such an insurrection was in no sort probable, unless a body of
+troops was brought to support it?  He who thought that the consequence of
+failing, when the attempt was once made, must be the utter ruin of the
+cause and the loss of the British liberty?  He who concurred in demanding
+as a _pis-aller_, and the least which could be insisted on, arms,
+ammunition, artillery, money, and officers?  I say, I might have asked
+what he meant to begin the dance when he had not the least assurance of
+any succour, but, on the contrary, the greatest reason imaginable to
+believe this affair was become as desperate abroad by the death of the
+most Christian King as it was at home by the discovery of the design and
+by the measures taken to defeat it?
+
+Instead of acting this part, which would have been wise, I took that
+which was plausible.  I resolved to contribute all I could to support the
+business, since it was begun.  I encouraged his lordship as long as I had
+the least ground for doing so, and I confirmed the Pretender in his
+resolution of going to Scotland when he had nothing better left him to
+do.  If I have anything to reproach myself with in the whole progress of
+the war in Scotland, it is having encouraged Lord Mar too long.  But, on
+the other hand, if I had given up the cause, and had written despondingly
+to him before this Court had explained itself as fully as the Marshal
+d’Huxelles did in the conversation which is mentioned above, it is easy
+to see what turn would have been given to such a conduct.
+
+The true cause of all the misfortunes which happened to the Scotch and to
+those who took arms in the North of England lies here—that they rose
+without any previous certainty of foreign help, in direct contradiction
+to the scheme which their leaders themselves had formed.  The excuse
+which I have heard made for this is that the Act of Parliament for
+curbing the Highlanders was near to be put in execution; that they would
+have been disarmed, and entirely disabled from rising at any other time,
+if they had not rose at this.  You can judge better than I of the
+validity of this excuse.  It seems to me that by management they might
+have gained time, and that even when they had been reduced to the dilemma
+supposed, they ought to have got together under pretence of resisting the
+infractions of the Union without any mention of the Pretender, and have
+treated with the Government on this foot.  By these means they might
+probably have preserved themselves in a condition of avowing their design
+when they should be sure of being backed from abroad.  At the worst, they
+might have declared for the Chevalier when all other expedients failed
+them.  In a word, I take this excuse not to be very good, and the true
+reason of this conduct to have been the rashness of the people and the
+inconsistent measures of their head.
+
+But admitting the excuse to be valid, it remains still an undeniable
+truth that this is the original fountain from whence all those waters of
+bitterness flowed which so many unhappy people have drunk of.  I have
+said already that the necessity of acting was precipitated before any
+measures to act with success had been taken, and that the necessity of
+doing so seemed to increase as the means of doing so were taken away.  To
+whom is this to be ascribed?  Is it to be ascribed to me, who had no
+share in these affairs till a few weeks before the Duke of Ormond was
+forced to abandon England, and the discovery of the intended invasion was
+published to Parliament and to the world? or is it to be ascribed to
+those who had from the first been at the head of this undertaking?
+
+Unable to defend this point, the next resort of the Jacobites is to this
+impudent and absurd affirmation—that, notwithstanding the disadvantages
+under which they took arms, they should have succeeded if the indirect
+assistances which were asked from France had been obtained.  Nay, that
+they should have been able to defend the Highlands if I had sent them a
+little powder.  Is it possible that a man should be wounded with such
+blunt weapons?  Much more than powder was asked for from the first, and I
+have already said that when the Chevalier came into Scotland, regular
+troops, artillery, etc., were demanded.  Both he and the Earl of Mar
+judged it impossible to stand their ground without such assistance as
+these.  How scandalous, then, must it be deemed that they suffer their
+dependents to spread in the world that for want of a little powder I
+forced them to abandon Scotland!  The Earl of Mar knows that all the
+powder in France would not have enabled him to stay at Perth as long as
+he did if he had not had another security.  And when that failed him, he
+must have quitted the party, if the Regent had given us all that he made
+some of us expect.
+
+But to finish all that I intend to say on a subject which has tired me,
+and perhaps you; the Jacobites affirm that the indirect assistances which
+they desired, might have been obtained; and I confess that I am
+inexcusable if this fact be true.  To prove it, they appeal to the little
+politicians of whom I have spoken so often.  I affirm, on the contrary,
+that nothing could be obtained here to support the Scotch or to encourage
+the English.  To prove the assertion, I appeal to the Ministers with whom
+I negotiated, and to the Regent himself, who, whatever language he may
+hold in private with other people, cannot controvert with me the truth of
+what I advance.  He excluded me formerly, that he might the more easily
+avoid doing anything; and perhaps he has blamed me since, that he might
+excuse his doing nothing.  All this may be true, and yet it will remain
+true that he would never have been prevailed upon to act directly against
+his interest in the only point of view which he has—I mean, the crown of
+France—and against the unanimous sense of all his Ministers.  Suppose
+that in the time of the late Queen, when she had the peace in view, a
+party in France had implored her assistance, and had applied to Margery
+Fielding, to Israel, to my Lady Oglethorpe, to Dr. Battle, and
+Lieutenant-General Stewart, what success do you imagine such applications
+would have had?  The Queen would have spoke them fair—she would speak
+otherwise to nobody; but do you imagine she would have made one step in
+their favour?  Olive Trant, Magny, Mademoiselle Chaussery, a dirty Abbé
+Brigault, and Mr. Dillon, are characters very apposite to these.  And
+what I suppose to have passed in England is not a whit more ridiculous
+than what really passed here.
+
+I say nothing of the ships which the Jacobites pretend that they sent
+into Scotland three weeks or a month after the Pretender was returned.  I
+believe they might have had my Lord Stair’s connivance then, as well as
+the Regent’s.  I say nothing of the order which they pretend to have
+obtained, and which I never saw, for the stores that were seized at Havre
+to be delivered to Castel Blanco.  I have already said enough on this
+head, and you cannot have failed to observe that this signal favour was
+never obtained by these people till the Marshal d’Huxelles had owned to
+me that nothing was to be expected from France, and that the only thing
+which I could do was to endeavour to bring the Pretender, the Earl of
+Mar, and the principal persons who were most exposed, off, neither he nor
+I imagining that any such would be left behind.
+
+When I began to appear in the world, upon the advertisements which my
+friends gave me of the clamour that was raised against me, you will
+easily think I did not enter into so many particulars as I have done with
+you.  I said even less than you have seen in those letters which Brinsden
+wrote into England in March and April was twelvemonth, and yet the
+clamour sank immediately.  The people of consideration at this Court beat
+it down, and the Court of St. Germains grew so ashamed of it that the
+Queen thought fit to purge herself of having had any share in encouraging
+the discourses which were held against me, or having been so much as let
+into the secret of the measure which preceded them.  The provocation was
+great, but I resolved to act without passion.  I saw the advantage the
+Pretender and his council, who disposed of things better for me than I
+should have done for myself, had given me; but I saw likewise that I must
+improve this advantage with the utmost caution.
+
+As I never imagined that he would treat me in the manner he did, nor that
+his Ministers could be weak enough to advise him to it, I had resolved,
+on his return from Scotland, to follow him till his residence should be
+fixed somewhere or other.  After which, having served the Tories in this
+which I looked upon as their last struggle for power, and having
+continued to act in the Pretender’s affairs till the end of the term for
+which I embarked with him, I should have esteemed myself to be at
+liberty, and should in the civillest manner I was able have taken my
+leave of him.  Had we parted thus, I should have remained in a very
+strange situation during the rest of my life; but I had examined myself
+thoroughly, I was determined, I was prepared.
+
+On one side he would have thought that he had a sort of right on any
+future occasion to call me out of my retreat; the Tories would probably
+have thought the same thing: my resolution was taken to refuse them both,
+and I foresaw that both would condemn me.  On the other side, the
+consideration of his keeping measures with me, joined to that of having
+once openly declared for him, would have created a point of honour by
+which I should have been tied down, not only from ever engaging against
+him, but also from making my peace at home.  The Chevalier cut this
+gordian knot asunder at one blow.  He broke the links of that chain which
+former engagements had fastened on me, and gave me a right to esteem
+myself as free from all obligations of keeping measures with him as I
+should have continued if I had never engaged in his interest.  I took
+therefore, from that moment, the resolution of making my peace at home,
+and of employing all the unfortunate experience I had acquired abroad to
+undeceive my friends and to promote the union and the quiet of my
+country.
+
+The Earl of Stair had received a full power to treat with me whilst I was
+engaged with the Pretender, as I have been since informed.  He had done
+me the justice to believe me incapable to hearken, in such circumstances,
+to any proposals of that kind; and as much friendship as he had for me,
+as much as I had for him, we entertained not the least even indirect
+correspondence together during that whole time.  Soon afterwards he
+employed a person to communicate to me the disposition of his Majesty to
+grant me my pardon, and his own desire to give me, on this occasion, all
+the proofs he could of his inclination in my favour.  I embraced the
+offer, as it became me to do, with all possible sense of the King’s
+goodness, and of his lordship’s friendship.  We met, we talked together,
+and he wrote to the Court on the subject.  The turn which the Ministers
+gave to this matter was, to enter into a treaty to reverse my attainder,
+and to stipulate the conditions on which this act of grace should be
+granted me.
+
+The notion of a treaty shocked me.  I resolved never to be restored
+rather than go that way to work; and I opened myself without any reserve
+to Lord Stair.  I told him that I looked on myself to be obliged in
+honour and in conscience to undeceive my friends in England, both as to
+the state of foreign affairs, as to the management of the Jacobite
+interest abroad, and as to the characters of persons—in every one of
+which points I knew them to be most grossly and most dangerously deluded;
+that the treatment I had received from the Pretender and his adherents
+would justify me to the world in doing this; that if I remained in exile
+all my life, he might be assured that I would never more have to do with
+the Jacobite cause; and that if I was restored, I should give it an
+effectual blow, in making that apology which the Pretender has put me
+under a necessity of making: that in doing this I flattered myself that I
+should contribute something to the establishment of the King’s
+Government, and to the union of his subjects; but that this was all the
+merit which I could promise to have; that if the Court believed these
+professions to be sincere, a treaty with me was unnecessary for them; and
+that if they did not believe them so, a treaty with them was dangerous
+for me; that I was determined in this whole transaction to make no one
+step which I would not own in the face of the world; that in other
+circumstances it might be sufficient to act honestly, but that in a case
+as extraordinary as mine it was necessary to act clearly, and to leave no
+room for the least doubtful construction.
+
+The Earl of Stair, as well as Mr. Craggs, who arrived soon after in
+France, came into my sense.  I have reason to believe that the King has
+approved it likewise upon their representations, since he has been
+pleased to give me the most gracious assurances of his favour.  What the
+effect of all this may be in the next or in any other Session, I know
+not; but this is the foot on which I have put myself, and on which I
+stand at the moment I write to you.  The Whigs may continue inveterate,
+and by consequence frustrate his Majesty’s good intentions towards me;
+the Tories may continue to rail at me, on the credit of such enemies as I
+have described to you in the course of this relation: neither the one nor
+the other shall make me swerve out of the path which I have traced to
+myself.
+
+I have now led you through the several stages which I proposed at first;
+and I should do wrong to your good understanding, as well as to our
+mutual friendship, if I suspected that you could hold any other language
+to me than that which Dolabella uses to Cicero: “Satisfactum est jam a te
+vel officio vel familiaritati; satisfactum etiam partibus.”  The King,
+who pardons me, might complain of me; the Whigs might declaim against me;
+my family might reproach me for the little regard which I have shown to
+my own and to their interests; but where is the crime I have been guilty
+of towards my party and towards my friends?  In what part of my conduct
+will the Tories find an excuse for the treatment which they have given
+me?  As Tories such as they were when I left England, I defy them to find
+any.  But here lies the sore, and, tender as it is, I must lay it open.
+Those amongst them who rail at me now are changed from what they were, or
+from what they professed themselves to be, when we lived and acted
+together.  They were Tories then; they are Jacobites now.  Their
+objections to the course of my conduct whilst I was in the Pretender’s
+interest are the pretence; the true reason of their anger is, that I
+renounce the Pretender for my life.  When you were first driven into this
+interest, I may appeal to you for the notion which the party had.  You
+thought of restoring him by the strength of the Tories, and of opposing a
+Tory king to a Whig king.  You took him up as the instrument of your
+revenge and of your ambition.  You looked on him as your creature, and
+never once doubted of making what terms you pleased with him.  This is so
+true that the same language is still held to the catechumens in
+Jacobitism.  Were the contrary to be avowed even now, the party in
+England would soon diminish.  I engaged on this principle when your
+orders sent me to Commercy, and I never acted on any other.  This ought
+to have been part of my merit towards the Tories; and it would have been
+so if they had continued in the same dispositions.  But they are changed,
+and this very thing is become my crime.  Instead of making the Pretender
+their tool, they are his.  Instead of having in view to restore him on
+their own terms, they are labouring to do it without any terms; that is,
+to speak properly, they are ready to receive him on his.  Be not
+deceived: there is not a man on this side of the water who acts in any
+other manner.  The Church of England Jacobite and the Irish Papist seem
+in every respect to have the same cause.  Those on your side of the water
+who correspond with these are to be comprehended in the same class; and
+from hence it is that the clamour raised against me has been kept up with
+so much industry, and is redoubled on the least appearance of my return
+home, and of my being in a situation to justify myself.
+
+You have seen already what reasons the Pretender, and the several sorts
+of people who compose his party here, had to get rid of me, and to cover
+me to the utmost of their power with infamy.  Their views were as short
+in this case as they are in all others.  They did not see at first that
+this conduct would not only give me a right, but put me under a necessity
+of keeping no farther measures with them, and of laying the whole mystery
+of their iniquity open.  As soon as they discovered this, they took the
+only course which was left them—that of poisoning the minds of the
+Tories, and of creating such prejudices against me whilst I remained in a
+condition of not speaking for myself, as will they hope prevent the
+effect of whatever I may say when I am in a condition of pleading my own
+cause.  The bare apprehension that I shall show the world that I have
+been guilty of no crime renders me criminal among these men; and they
+hold themselves ready, being unable to reply either in point of fact or
+in point of reason, to drown my voice in the confusion of their clamour.
+
+The only crimes I am guilty of, I own.  I own the crime of having been
+for the Pretender in a very different manner from those with whom I
+acted.  I served him as faithfully, I served him as well as they; but I
+served him on a different principle.  I own the crime of having renounced
+him, and of being resolved never to have to do with him as long as I
+live.  I own the crime of being determined sooner or later, as soon as I
+can, to clear myself of all the unjust aspersions which have been cast
+upon me; to undeceive by my experience as many as I can of those Tories
+who may have been drawn into error; and to contribute, if ever I return
+home, as far as I am able, to promote the national good of Britain
+without any other regard.  These crimes do not, I hope, by this time
+appear to you to be of a very black dye.  You may come, perhaps, to think
+them virtues, when you have read and considered what remains to be said;
+for before I conclude, it is necessary that I open one matter to you
+which I could not weave in sooner without breaking too much the thread of
+my narration.  In this place, unmingled with anything else, it will have,
+as it deserves to have, your whole attention.
+
+Whoever composed that curious piece of false fact, false argument, false
+English, and false eloquence, the letter from Avignon, says that I was
+not thought the most proper person to speak about religion.  I confess I
+should be of his mind, and should include his patrons in my case, if the
+practice of it was to be recommended; for surely it is unpardonable
+impudence to impose by precept what we do not teach by example.  I should
+be of the same mind, if the nature of religion was to be explained, if
+its mysteries were to be fathomed, and if this great truth was to be
+established—that the Church of England has the advantage over all other
+Churches in purity of doctrine, and in wisdom of discipline.  But nothing
+of this kind was necessary.  This would have been the task of reverend
+and learned divines.  We of the laity had nothing more to do than to lay
+in our claim that we could never submit to be governed by a Prince who
+was not of the religion of our country.  Such a declaration could hardly
+have failed of some effect towards opening the eyes and disposing the
+mind even of the Pretender.  At least, in justice to ourselves, and in
+justice to our party, we who were here ought to have made it; and the
+influence of it on the Pretender ought to have become the rule of our
+subsequent conduct.
+
+In thinking in this manner I think no otherwise now than I have always
+thought; and I cannot forget, nor you neither, what passed when, a little
+before the death of the Queen, letters were conveyed from the Chevalier
+to several persons—to myself among others.  In the letter to me the
+article of religion was so awkwardly handled that he made the principal
+motive of the confidence we ought to have in him to consist in his firm
+resolution to adhere to Popery.  The effect which this epistle had on me
+was the same which it had on those Tories to whom I communicated it at
+that time; it made us resolve to have nothing to do with him.
+
+Some time after this I was assured by several, and I make no doubt but
+others have been so too, that the Chevalier at the bottom was not a
+bigot; that whilst he remained abroad and could expect no succour, either
+present or future, from any Princes but those of the Roman Catholic
+Communion, it was prudent, whatever he might think, to make no
+demonstration of a design to change; but that his temper was such, and he
+was already so disposed, that we might depend on his compliance with what
+should be desired of him if ever he came amongst us, and was taken from
+under the wing of the Queen his mother.  To strengthen this opinion of
+his character, it was said that he had sent for Mr. Leslie over; that he
+allowed him to celebrate the Church of England service in his family; and
+that he had promised to hear what this divine should represent on the
+subject of religion to him.  When I came abroad, the same things, and
+much more, were at first insinuated to me; and I began to let them make
+impression upon me, notwithstanding what I had seen under his hand.  I
+would willingly flatter myself that this impression disposed me to
+incline to Jacobitism rather than allow that the inclination to
+Jacobitism disposed me easily to believe what, upon that principle, I had
+so much reason to wish might be true.  Which was the cause, and which the
+effect, I cannot well determine: perhaps they did mutually occasion each
+other.  Thus much is certain—that I was far from weighing this matter as
+I ought to have done when the solicitation of my friends and the
+persecution of my enemies precipitated me into engagements with the
+Pretender.
+
+I was willing to take it for granted that since you were as ready to
+declare as I believed you at that time, you must have had entire
+satisfaction on the article of religion.  I was soon undeceived; this
+string had never been touched.  My own observation, and the unanimous
+report of all those who from his infancy have approached the Pretender’s
+person, soon taught me how difficult it is to come to terms with him on
+this head, and how unsafe to embark without them.
+
+His religion is not founded on the love of virtue and the detestation of
+vice; on a sense of that obedience which is due to the will of the
+Supreme Being, and a sense of those obligations which creatures formed to
+live in a mutual dependence on one another lie under.  The spring of his
+whole conduct is fear.  Fear of the horns of the devil and of the flames
+of hell.  He has been taught to believe that nothing but a blind
+submission to the Church of Rome and a strict adherence to all the terms
+of that communion can save him from these dangers.  He has all the
+superstition of a Capuchin, but I found on him no tincture of the
+religion of a prince.  Do not imagine that I loose the reins to my
+imagination, or that I write what my resentments dictate: I tell you
+simply my opinion.  I have heard the same description of his character
+made by those who know him best, and I conversed with very few among the
+Roman Catholics themselves who did not think him too much a Papist.
+
+Nothing gave me from the beginning so much uneasiness as the
+consideration of this part of his character, and of the little care which
+had been taken to correct it.  A true turn had not been given to the
+first steps which were made with him.  The Tories who engaged afterwards,
+threw themselves, as it were, at his head.  He had been suffered to think
+that the party in England wanted him as much as he wanted them.  There
+was no room to hope for much compliance on the head of religion when he
+was in these sentiments, and when he thought the Tories too far advanced
+to have it in their power to retreat; and little dependence was at any
+time to be placed on the promises of a man capable of thinking his
+damnation attached to the observance, and his salvation to the breach, of
+these very promises.  Something, however, was to be done, and I thought
+that the least which could be done was to deal plainly with him, and to
+show him the impossibility of governing our nation by any other expedient
+than by complying with that which would be expected from him as to his
+religion.  This was thought too much by the Duke of Ormond and Mr.
+Leslie; although the duke could be no more ignorant than the minister how
+ill the latter had been used, how far the Chevalier had been from keeping
+the word which he had given, and on the faith of which Mr. Leslie had
+come over to him.  They both knew that he not only refused to hear
+himself, but that he sheltered the ignorance of his priests, or the
+badness of his cause, or both, behind his authority, and absolutely
+forbade all discourse concerning religion.  The duke seemed convinced
+that it would be time enough to talk of religion to him when he should be
+restored, or, at soonest, when he should be landed in England; that the
+influence under which he had lived being at a distance, the
+reasonableness of what we might propose, joined to the apparent necessity
+which would then stare him in the face, could not fail to produce all the
+effects which we could desire.
+
+To me this whole reasoning appeared fallacious.  Our business was not to
+make him change appearances on this side of the water, but to prepare him
+to give those which would be necessary on the other; and there was no
+room to hope that if we could gain nothing on his prejudices here, we
+should be able to overcome them in Britain.  I would have argued just as
+the Duke of Ormond and Leslie if I had been a Papist; and I saw well
+enough that some people about him, for in a great dearth of ability there
+was cunning to be met with, affected nothing more than to keep off all
+discourse of religion.  To my apprehension it was exceeding plain that we
+should find, if we were once in England, the necessity of going forward
+at any rate with him much greater than he would find that of complying
+with us.  I thought it an unpardonable fault to have taken a formal
+engagement with him, when no previous satisfaction had been obtained on a
+point at least as essential to our civil as to our religious rights; to
+the peace of the State as to the prosperity of the Church; and I looked
+on this fault to be aggravated by every day’s delay.  Our silence was
+unfair both to the Chevalier and to our friends in England.  He was
+induced by it to believe that they would exact far less from him than we
+knew they expected, and they were confirmed in an opinion of his
+docility, which we knew to be void of all foundation.  The pretence of
+removing that influence under which he had lived was frivolous, and
+should never have been urged to me, who saw plainly that, according to
+the measures pursued by the very persons who urged it, he must be
+environed in England by the same people that surrounded him here; and
+that the Court of St. James’s would be constituted, if ever he was
+restored, in the same manner as that of St. Germains was.
+
+When the draft of a declaration and other papers which were to be
+dispersed in Great Britain came to be settled, it appeared that my
+apprehension and distrust were but too well founded.  The Pretender took
+exception against several passages, and particularly against those
+wherein a direct promise of securing the Churches of England and Ireland
+was made.  He was told, he said, that he could not in conscience make
+such a promise, and, the debate being kept up a little while, he asked me
+with some warmth why the Tories were so desirous to have him if they
+expected those things from him which his religion did not allow.  I left
+these drafts, by his order, with him, that he might consider and amend
+them.  I cannot say that he sent them to the Queen to be corrected by her
+confessor and the rest of her council, but I firmly believe it.  Sure I
+am that he took time sufficient to do this before he sent them from Bar,
+where he then was, to Paris, whither I was returned.  When they were
+digested in such a manner as satisfied his casuists he made them be
+printed, and my name was put to the declaration, as if the original had
+been signed by me.  I had hitherto submitted my opinion to the judgment
+of others, but on this occasion I took advice from myself.  I declared to
+him that I would not suffer my name to be at the bottom of this paper.
+All the copies which came to my hands I burnt, and another was printed
+off without any countersigning.
+
+The whole tenor of the amendments was one continued instance of the
+grossest bigotry, and the most material passages were turned with all the
+Jesuitical prevarication imaginable.  As much as it was his interest at
+that time to cultivate the respect which many of the Tories really had
+for the memory of the late Queen, and which many others affected as a
+farther mark of their opposition to the Court and to the Whig party; as
+much as it was his interest to weave the honour of her name into his
+cause, and to render her, even after her death, a party to the dispute,
+he could not be prevailed upon to give her that character which her
+enemies allowed her, nor to make use of those expressions, in speaking of
+her, which, by the general manner of their application, are come to be
+little more than terms of respect and words of form proper in the style
+of public acts.  For instance:—
+
+She was called in the original draft “his sister of glorious and blessed
+memory.”  In that which he published, the epithet of “blessed” was left
+out.  Her eminent justice and her exemplary piety were occasionally
+mentioned; in lieu of which he substituted a flat, and, in this case, an
+invidious expression, “her inclinations to justice.”
+
+Not content with declaring her neither just nor pious in this world he
+did little less than declare her damned in the other, according to the
+charitable principles of the Church of Rome.
+
+“When it pleased Almighty God to take her to Himself,” was the expression
+used in speaking of the death of the Queen.  This he erased, and instead
+thereof inserted these words: “When it pleased Almighty God to put a
+period to her life.”
+
+He graciously allowed the Universities to be nurseries of loyalty; but
+did not think that it became him to style them “nurseries of religion.”
+
+Since his father passes already for a saint, and since reports are
+encouraged of miracles which they suppose to be wrought at his tomb, he
+might have allowed his grandfather to pass for a martyr; but he struck
+out of the draft these words, “that blessed martyr who died for his
+people,” which were applied to King Charles I., and would say nothing
+more of him than that “he fell a sacrifice to rebellion.”
+
+In the clause which related to the Churches of England and Ireland there
+was a plain and direct promise inserted of “effectual provision for their
+security, and for their re-establishment in all those rights which belong
+to them.”  This clause was not suffered to stand, but another was formed,
+wherein all mention of the Church of Ireland was omitted, and nothing was
+promised to the Church of England but the security, and “re-establishment
+of all those rights, privileges, immunities, and possessions which belong
+to her,” and wherein he had already promised by his declaration of the
+20th of July, to secure and “protect all her members.”
+
+I need make no comment on a proceeding so easy to be understood.  The
+drift of these evasions, and of this affected obscurity, is obvious
+enough—at least, it will appear so by the observations which remain to be
+made.
+
+He was so afraid of admitting any words which might be construed into a
+promise of his consenting to those things which should be found necessary
+for the present or future security of our constitution, that in a
+paragraph where he was made to say that he thought himself obliged to be
+solicitous for the prosperity of the Church of England, the word
+prosperity was expunged, and we were left by this mental reservation to
+guess what he was solicitous for.  It could not be for her prosperity:
+that he had expunged.  It must therefore be for her destruction, which in
+his language would have been styled her conversion.
+
+Another remarkable proof of the same kind is to be found towards the
+conclusion of the declaration.  After having spoken of the peace and
+flourishing estate of the kingdom, he was made to express his readiness
+to concert with the two Houses such further measures as should be thought
+necessary for securing the same to future generations.  The design of
+this paragraph you see.  He and his council saw it too, and therefore the
+word “securing” was laid aside, and the word “leaving” was inserted in
+lieu of it.
+
+One would imagine that a declaration corrected in this manner might have
+been suffered to go abroad without any farther precaution.  But these
+papers had been penned by Protestants; and who could answer that there
+might not be still ground sufficient from the tenor of them to insist on
+everything necessary for the security of that religion?  The declaration
+of the 20th of July had been penned by a priest of the Scotch college,
+and the expressions had been measured so as to suit perfectly with the
+conduct which the Chevalier intended to hold; so as to leave room to
+distinguish him, upon future occasions, with the help of a little pious
+sophistry, out of all the engagements which he seemed to take in it.
+This orthodox paper was therefore to accompany the heretical paper into
+the world, and no promise of moment was to stand in the latter, unless
+qualified by a reference to the former.  Thus the Church was to be
+secured in the rights, etc., which belong to her.  How?  No otherwise
+than according to the declaration of the month of July.  And what does
+that promise?  Security and protection to the members of this Church in
+the enjoyment of their property.  I make no doubt but Bellarmine, if he
+had been the Chevalier’s confessor, would have passed this paragraph thus
+amended.  No engagement whatever taken in favour of the Church of
+Ireland, and a happy distinction found between securing that of England,
+and protecting her members.  Many a useful project for the destruction of
+heretics, and for accumulating power and riches to the See of Rome, has
+been established on a more slender foundation.
+
+The same spirit reigns through the whole.  Civil and religious rights are
+no otherwise to be confirmed than in conformity to the declaration of
+July; nay, the general pardon is restrained and limited to the terms
+prescribed therein.
+
+This is the account which I judged too important to be omitted, and which
+I chose to give you all together.  I shall surely be justified at present
+in concluding that the Tories are grossly deluded in their opinion of
+this Prince’s character, or else that they sacrifice all which ought to
+be esteemed precious and sacred among men to their passions.  In both
+these cases I remain still a Tory, and am true to the party.  In the
+first, I endeavour to undeceive you by an experience purchased at my
+expense and for your sakes: in the second, I endeavour to prevail on you
+to revert to that principle from which we have deviated.  You never
+intended, whilst I lived amongst you, the ruin of your country; and yet
+every step which you now make towards the restoration you are so fond of,
+is a step towards this ruin.  No man of sense, well informed, can ever go
+into measures for it, unless he thinks himself and his country in such
+desperate circumstances that nothing is left them but to choose of two
+ruins that which they like best.
+
+The exile of the royal family, under Cromwell’s usurpation, was the
+principal cause of all those misfortunes in which Britain has been
+involved, as well as of many of those which have happened to the rest of
+Europe, during more than half a century.
+
+The two brothers, Charles and James, became then infected with Popery to
+such degrees as their different characters admitted of.  Charles had
+parts, and his good understanding served as an antidote to repel the
+poison.  James, the simplest man of his time, drank off the whole
+chalice.  The poison met in his composition with all the fear, all the
+credulity, and all the obstinacy of temper proper to increase its
+virulence and to strengthen its effect.  The first had always a wrong
+bias upon him; he connived at the establishment, and indirectly
+contributed to the growth, of that power which afterwards disturbed the
+peace and threatened the liberty of Europe so often; but he went no
+further out of the way.  The opposition of his Parliaments and his own
+reflections stopped him here.  The Prince and the people were, indeed,
+mutually jealous of one another, from whence much present disorder
+flowed, and the foundation of future evils was laid; but his good and his
+bad principles combating still together, he maintained, during a reign of
+more than twenty years, in some tolerable degree, the authority of the
+Crown and the flourishing estate of the nation.  The last, drunk with
+superstitious and even enthusiastic zeal, ran headlong into his own ruin
+whilst he endeavoured to precipitate ours.  His Parliament and his people
+did all they could to save themselves by winning him.  But all was vain;
+he had no principle on which they could take hold.  Even his good
+qualities worked against them, and his love of his country went halves
+with his bigotry.  How he succeeded we have heard from our fathers.  The
+revolution of 1688 saved the nation and ruined the King.
+
+Now the Pretender’s education has rendered him infinitely less fit than
+his uncle—and at least as unfit as his father—to be King of Great
+Britain.  Add to this that there is no resource in his understanding.
+Men of the best sense find it hard to overcome religious prejudices,
+which are of all the strongest; but he is a slave to the weakest.  The
+rod hangs like the sword of Damocles over his head, and he trembles
+before his mother and his priest.  What, in the name of God, can any
+member of the Church of England promise himself from such a character?
+Are we by another revolution to return into the same state from which we
+were delivered by the first?  Let us take example from the Roman
+Catholics, who act very reasonably in refusing to submit to a Protestant
+Prince.  Henry IV. had at least as good a title to the crown of France as
+the Pretender has to ours.  His religion alone stood in his way, and he
+had never been King if he had not removed that obstacle.  Shall we submit
+to a Popish Prince, who will no more imitate Henry IV. in changing his
+religion than he will imitate those shining qualities which rendered him
+the honestest gentleman, the bravest captain, and the greatest prince of
+his age?  Allow me to give a loose to my pen for a moment on this
+subject.  General benevolence and universal charity seem to be
+established in the Gospel as the distinguishing badges of Christianity.
+How it happens I cannot tell; but so it is, that in all ages of the
+Church the professors of Christianity seem to have been animated by a
+quite contrary spirit.  Whilst they were thinly scattered over the world,
+tolerated in some places, but established nowhere, their zeal often
+consumed their charity.  Paganism, at that time the religion by law
+established, was insulted by many of them; the ceremonies were disturbed,
+the altars thrown down.  As soon as, by the favour of Constantine, their
+numbers were increased, and the reins of government were put into their
+hands, they began to employ the secular arm, not only against different
+religions, but against different sects which arose in their own religion.
+A man may boldly affirm that more blood has been shed in the disputes
+between Christian and Christian than has ever been drawn from the whole
+body of them in the persecutions of the heathen emperors and in the
+conquests of the Mahometan princes.  From these they have received
+quarter, but never from one another.  The Christian religion is actually
+tolerated among the Mahometans, and the domes of churches and mosques
+arise in the same city.  But it will be hard to find an example where one
+sect of Christians has tolerated another which it was in their power to
+extirpate.  They have gone farther in these later ages; what was
+practised formerly has been taught since.  Persecution has been reduced
+into system, and the disciples of the meek and humble Jesus have avowed a
+tyranny which the most barbarous conquerors never claimed.  The wicked
+subtilty of casuists has established breach of faith with those who
+differ from us as a duty in opposition to faith, and murder itself has
+been made one of the means of salvation.  I know very well that the
+Reformed Churches have been far from going those cruel lengths which are
+authorised by the doctrine as well as example of that of Rome, though
+Calvin put a flaming sword on the title of a French edition of his
+Institute, with this motto, “Je ne suis point venu mettre la paix, mais
+l’epée;” but I know likewise that the difference lies in the means and
+not in the aim of their policy.  The Church of England, the most humane
+of all of them, would root out every other religion if it was in her
+power.  She would not hang and burn; her measures would be milder, and
+therefore, perhaps, more effectual.
+
+Since, then, there is this inveterate rancour among Christians, can
+anything be more absurd than for those of one persuasion to trust the
+supreme power, or any part of it, to those of another?  Particularly must
+it not be reputed madness in those of our religion to trust themselves in
+the hands of Roman Catholics?  Must it not be reputed impudence in a
+Roman Catholic to expect that we should? he who looks upon us as
+heretics, as men in rebellion against a lawful—nay, a divine—authority,
+and whom it is, therefore, meritorious by all sorts of ways to reduce to
+obedience?  There are many, I know, amongst them who think more
+generously, and whose morals are not corrupted by that which is called
+religion; but this is the spirit of the priesthood, in whose scale that
+scrap of a parable, “Compel them to come in,” which they apply as they
+please, outweighs the whole Decalogue.  This will be the spirit of every
+man who is bigot enough to be under their direction; and so much is
+sufficient for my present purpose.
+
+During your last Session of Parliament it was expected that the Whigs
+would attempt to repeal the Occasional Bill.  The same jealousy
+continues; there is, perhaps, foundation for it.  Give me leave to ask
+you upon what principle we argued for making this law, and upon what
+principle you must argue against the repeal of it.  I have mentioned the
+principle in the beginning of this discourse.  No man ought to be trusted
+with any share of power under a Government who must, to act consistently
+with himself, endeavour the destruction of that very Government.  Shall
+this proposition pass for true when it is applied to keep a Presbyterian
+from being mayor of a corporation, and shall it become false when it is
+applied to keep a Papist from being king?  The proposition is equally
+true in both cases; but the argument drawn from it is just so much
+stronger in the latter than in the former case, as the mischiefs which
+may result from the power and influence of a king are greater than those
+which can be wrought by a magistrate of the lowest order.  This seems to
+my apprehension to be _argumentum ad hominem_, and I do not see by what
+happy distinction a Jacobite Tory could elude the force of it.
+
+It may be said, and it has been urged to me, that if the Chevalier was
+restored, the knowledge of his character would be our security; “habet
+fœnum in cornu;” there would be no pretence for trusting him, and by
+consequence it would be easy to put such restrictions on the exercise of
+the regal power as might hinder him from invading or sapping our religion
+and liberty.  But this I utterly deny.  Experience has shown us how ready
+men are to court power and profit, and who can determine how far either
+the Tories or the Whigs would comply, in order to secure to themselves
+the enjoyment of all the places in the kingdom?  Suppose, however, that a
+majority of true Israelites should be found, whom no temptation could
+oblige to bow the knee to Baal; in order to preserve the Government on
+one hand must they not destroy it on the other?  The necessary
+restrictions would in this case be so many and so important as to leave
+hardly the shadow of a monarchy if he submitted to them; and if he did
+not submit to them, these patriots would have no resource left but in
+rebellion.  Thus, therefore, the affair would turn if the Pretender was
+restored.  We might, most probably, lose our religion and liberty by the
+bigotry of the Prince and the corruption of the people.  We should have
+no chance of preserving them but by an entire change of the whole frame
+of our Government or by another revolution.  What reasonable man would
+voluntarily reduce himself to the necessity of making an option among
+such melancholy alternatives?
+
+The best which could be hoped for, were the Chevalier on the throne,
+would be that a thread of favourable accidents, improved by the wisdom
+and virtue of Parliament, might keep off the evil day during his reign.
+But still the fatal cause would be established; it would be entailed upon
+us, and every man would be apprised that sooner or later the fatal effect
+must follow.  Consider a little what a condition we should be in, both
+with respect to our foreign interest and our domestic quiet, whilst the
+reprieve lasted, whilst the Chevalier or his successors made no direct
+attack upon the constitution.
+
+As to the first, it is true, indeed, that princes and States are friends
+or foes to one another according as the motives of ambition drive them.
+These are the first principles of union and division amongst them.  The
+Protestant Powers of Europe have joined, in our days, to support and
+aggrandise the House of Austria, as they did in the days of our
+forefathers to defeat her designs and to reduce her power; and the most
+Christian King of France has more than once joined his councils, and his
+arms too, with the councils and arms of the most Mahometan Emperor of
+Constantinople.  But still there is, and there must continue, as long as
+the influence of the Papal authority subsists in Europe, another general,
+permanent, and invariable division of interests.  The powers of earth,
+like those of heaven, have two distinct motions.  Each of them rolls in
+his own political orb, but each of them is hurried at the same time round
+the great vortex of his religion.  If this general notion be just, apply
+it to the present case.  Whilst a Roman Catholic holds the rudder, how
+can we expect to be steered in our proper course?  His political interest
+will certainly incline him to direct our first motion right, but his
+mistaken religious interest will render him incapable of doing it
+steadily.
+
+As to the last, our domestic quiet; even whilst the Chevalier and those
+of his race concealed their game, we should remain in the most unhappy
+state which human nature is subject to, a state of doubt and suspense.
+Our preservation would depend on making him the object of our eternal
+jealousy, who, to render himself and his people happy, ought to be that
+of our entire confidence.
+
+Whilst the Pretender and his successors forbore to attack the religion
+and liberty of the nation, we should remain in the condition of those
+people who labour under a broken constitution, or who carry about them
+some chronical distemper.  They feel a little pain at every moment; or a
+certain uneasiness, which is sometimes less tolerable than pain, hangs
+continually on them, and they languish in the constant expectation of
+dying perhaps in the severest torture.
+
+But if the fear of hell should dissipate all other fears in the
+Pretender’s mind, and carry him, which is frequently the effect of that
+passion, to the most desperate undertakings; if among his successors a
+man bold enough to make the attempt should arise, the condition of the
+British nation would be still more deplorable.  The attempt succeeding,
+we should fall into tyranny; for a change of religion could never be
+brought about by consent; and the same force that would be sufficient to
+enslave our consciences, would be sufficient for all the other purposes
+of arbitrary power.  The attempt failing, we should fall into anarchy;
+for there is no medium when disputes between a prince and his people are
+arrived at a certain point; he must either be submitted to or deposed.
+
+I have now laid before you even more than I intended to have said when I
+took my pen, and I am persuaded that if these papers ever come to your
+hands, they will enable you to cast up the account between party and me.
+Till the time of the Queen’s death it stands, I believe, even between us.
+The Tories distinguished me by their approbation and by the credit which
+I had amongst them, and I endeavoured to distinguish myself in their
+service, under the immediate weight of great discouragement and with the
+not very distant prospect of great danger.  Since that time the account
+is not so even, and I dare appeal to any impartial person whether my side
+in it be that of the debtor.  As to the opinion of mankind in general,
+and the judgment which posterity will pass on these matters, I am under
+no great concern.  “Suum cuique decus posteritas rependit.”
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER TO ALEXANDER POPE.
+
+
+DEAR SIR,—Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I have
+wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that I submit
+to the task you impose upon me.  The mere compliance with anything you
+desire, is a pleasure to me.  On the present occasion, however, this
+compliance is a little interested; and that I may not assume more merit
+with you than I really have, I will own that in performing this act of
+friendship—for such you are willing to esteem it—the purity of my motive
+is corrupted by some regard to my private utility.  In short, I suspect
+you to be guilty of a very friendly fraud, and to mean my service whilst
+you seem to mean your own.
+
+In leading me to discourse, as you have done often, and in pressing me to
+write, as you do now, on certain subjects, you may propose to draw me
+back to those trains of thought which are, above all others, worthy to
+employ the human mind: and I thank you for it.  They have been often
+interrupted by the business and dissipations of the world, but they were
+never so more grievously to me, nor less usefully to the public, than
+since royal seduction prevailed on me to abandon the quiet and leisure of
+the retreat I had chosen abroad, and to neglect the example of Rutilius,
+for I might have imitated him in this at least, who fled further from his
+country when he was invited home.
+
+You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner.  You have copied
+no other writer, nor will you, I think, be copied by any one.  It is with
+genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty things that
+charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty, has always
+something particular, something that belongs to itself alone.  It is
+always distinguishable, not only from those who have no claim to
+excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such there are.
+
+I am pleased, you may be sure, to find your satire turn, in the very
+beginning of these epistles, against the principal cause—for such you
+know that I think it—of all the errors, all the contradictions, and all
+the disputes which have arisen among those who impose themselves on their
+fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost sole proprietors of a gift
+of God which is common to the whole species.  This gift is reason; a
+faculty, or rather an aggregate of faculties, that is bestowed in
+different degrees; and not in the highest, certainly, on those who make
+the highest pretensions to it.  Let your satire chastise, and, if it be
+possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain
+curiosity and bold presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the
+midst of ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge.  The
+man who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or
+theist, or atheist, deserves no more to be respected than one of those
+trifling creatures who are conscious of little else than their animality,
+and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections of their nature
+as the other attempts to go beyond them.  You will discover as many silly
+affections, as much foppery and futility, as much inconsistency and low
+artifice in one as in the other.  I never met the mad woman at Brentford
+decked out in old and new rags, and nice and fantastical in the manner of
+wearing them, without reflecting on many of the profound scholars and
+sublime philosophers of our own and of former ages.
+
+You may expect some contradiction and some obloquy on the part of these
+men, though you will have less to apprehend from their malice and
+resentment than a writer in prose on the same subjects would have.  You
+will be safer in the generalities of poetry; and I know your precaution
+enough to know that you will screen yourself in them against any direct
+charge of heterodoxy.  But the great clamour of all will be raised when
+you descend lower, and let your Muse loose among the herd of mankind.
+Then will those powers of dulness whom you have ridiculed into
+immortality be called forth in one united phalanx against you.  But why
+do I talk of what may happen?  You have experienced lately something more
+than I prognosticate.  Fools and knaves should be modest at least; they
+should ask quarter of men of sense and virtue: and so they do till they
+grow up to a majority, till a similitude of character assures them of the
+protection of the great.  But then vice and folly such as prevail in our
+country, corrupt our manners, deform even social life, and contribute to
+make us ridiculous as well as miserable, will claim respect for the sake
+of the vicious and the foolish.  It will be then no longer sufficient to
+spare persons; for to draw even characters of imagination must become
+criminal when the application of them to those of highest rank and
+greatest power cannot fail to be made.  You began to laugh at the
+ridiculous taste or the no taste in gardening and building of some men
+who are at great expense in both.  What a clamour was raised instantly!
+The name of Timon was applied to a noble person with double malice, to
+make him ridiculous, and you, who lived in friendship with him, odious.
+By the authority that employed itself to encourage this clamour, and by
+the industry used to spread and support it, one would have thought that
+you had directed your satire in that epistle to political subjects, and
+had inveighed against those who impoverish, dishonour, and sell their
+country, instead of making yourself inoffensively merry at the expense of
+men who ruin none but themselves, and render none but themselves
+ridiculous.  What will the clamour be, and how will the same authority
+foment it, when you proceed to lash, in other instances, our want of
+elegance even in luxury, and our wild profusion, the source of insatiable
+rapacity, and almost universal venality?  My mind forebodes that the time
+will come—and who knows how near it may be?—when other powers than those
+of Grub Street may be drawn forth against you, and when vice and folly
+may be avowedly sheltered behind a power instituted for better and
+contrary purposes—for the punishment of one, and for the reformation of
+both.
+
+But, however this may be, pursue your task undauntedly, and whilst so
+many others convert the noblest employments of human society into sordid
+trades, let the generous Muse resume her ancient dignity, re-assert her
+ancient prerogative, and instruct and reform, as well as amuse the world.
+Let her give a new turn to the thoughts of men, raise new affections in
+their minds, and determine in another and better manner the passions of
+their hearts.  Poets, they say, were the first philosophers and divines
+in every country, and in ours, perhaps, the first institutions of
+religion and civil policy were owing to our bards.  Their task might be
+hard, their merit was certainly great.  But if they were to rise now from
+the dead they would find the second task, if I mistake not, much harder
+than the first, and confess it more easy to deal with ignorance than with
+error.  When societies are once established and Governments formed, men
+flatter themselves that they proceed in cultivating the first rudiments
+of civility, policy, religion, and learning.  But they do not observe
+that the private interests of many, the prejudices, affections, and
+passions of all, have a large share in the work, and often the largest.
+These put a sort of bias on the mind, which makes it decline from the
+straight course; and the further these supposed improvements are carried,
+the greater this declination grows, till men lose sight of primitive and
+real nature, and have no other guide but custom, a second and a false
+nature.  The author of one is divine wisdom; of the other, human
+imagination; and yet whenever the second stands in opposition to the
+first, as it does most frequently, the second prevails.  From hence it
+happens that the most civilised nations are often guilty of injustice and
+cruelty which the least civilised would abhor, and that many of the most
+absurd opinions and doctrines which have been imposed in the Dark Ages of
+ignorance continue to be the opinions and doctrines of ages enlightened
+by philosophy and learning.  “If I was a philosopher,” says Montaigne, “I
+would naturalise art instead of artilising Nature.”  The expression is
+odd, but the sense is good, and what he recommends would be done if the
+reasons that have been given did not stand in the way; if the
+self-interest of some men, the madness of others, and the universal pride
+of the human heart did not determine them to prefer error to truth and
+authority to reason.
+
+Whilst your Muse is employed to lash the vicious into repentance, or to
+laugh the fools of the age into shame, and whilst she rises sometimes to
+the noblest subjects of philosophical meditation, I shall throw upon
+paper, for your satisfaction and for my own, some part at least of what I
+have thought and said formerly on the last of these subjects, as well as
+the reflections that they may suggest to me further in writing on them.
+The strange situation I am in, and the melancholy state of public
+affairs, take up much of my time; divide, or even dissipate, my thoughts;
+and, which is worse, drag the mind down by perpetual interruptions from a
+philosophical tone or temper to the drudgery of private and public
+business.  The last lies nearest my heart; and since I am once more
+engaged in the service of my country, disarmed, gagged, and almost bound
+as I am, I will not abandon it as long as the integrity and perseverance
+of those who are under none of these disadvantages, and with whom I now
+co-operate, make it reasonable for me to act the same part.  Further than
+this no shadow of duty obliges me to go.  Plato ceased to act for the
+Commonwealth when he ceased to persuade, and Solon laid down his arms
+before the public magazine when Pisistratus grew too strong to be opposed
+any longer with hopes of success.
+
+Though my situation and my engagements are sufficiently known to you, I
+choose to mention them on this occasion lest you should expect from me
+anything more than I find myself able to perform whilst I am in them.  It
+has been said by many that they wanted time to make their discourses
+shorter; and if this be a good excuse, as I think it may be often, I lay
+in my claim to it.  You must neither expect in what I am about to write
+to you that brevity which might be expected in letters or essays, nor
+that exactness of method, nor that fulness of the several parts which
+they affect to observe who presume to write philosophical treatises.  The
+merit of brevity is relative to the manner and style in which any subject
+is treated, as well as to the nature of it; for the same subject may be
+sometimes treated very differently, and yet very properly, in both these
+respects.  Should the poet make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a long
+process of reasoning in the didactic style, he would be sure to tire his
+reader on the whole, like Lucretius, though he reasoned better than the
+Roman, and put into some parts of his work the same poetical fire.  He
+may write, as you have begun to do, on philosophical subjects, but he
+must write in his own character.  He must contract, he may shadow, he has
+a right to omit whatever will not be cast in the poetic mould; and when
+he cannot instruct, he may hope to please.  But the philosopher has no
+such privileges.  He may contract sometimes, he must never shadow.  He
+must be limited by his matter, lest he should grow whimsical, and by the
+parts of it which he understands best, lest he should grow obscure.  But
+these parts he must develop fully, and he has no right to omit anything
+that may serve the purpose of truth, whether it please or not.  As it
+would be disingenuous to sacrifice truth to popularity, so it is trifling
+to appeal to the reason and experience of mankind, as every philosophical
+writer does, or must be understood to do, and then to talk, like Plato
+and his ancient and modern disciples, to the imagination only.  There is
+no need, however, to banish eloquence out of philosophy, and truth and
+reason are no enemies to the purity nor to the ornaments of language.
+But as the want of an exact determination of ideas and of an exact
+precision in the use of words is inexcusable in a philosopher, he must
+preserve them, even at the expense of style.  In short, it seems to me
+that the business of the philosopher is to dilate, if I may borrow this
+word from Tully, to press, to prove, to convince; and that of the poet to
+hint, to touch his subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the
+affections, and to speak to the heart.
+
+Though I seem to prepare an apology for prolixity even in writing essays,
+I will endeavour not to be tedious, and this endeavour may succeed the
+better perhaps by declining any over-strict observation of method.  There
+are certain points of that which I esteem the first philosophy whereof I
+shall never lose sight, but this will be very consistent with a sort of
+epistolary licence.  To digress and to ramble are different things, and
+he who knows the country through which he travels may venture out of the
+highroad, because he is sure of finding his way back to it again.  Thus
+the several matters that may arise even accidentally before me will have
+some share in guiding my pen.
+
+I dare not promise that the sections or members of these essays will bear
+that nice proportion to one another and to the whole which a severe
+critic would require.  All I dare promise you is that my thoughts, in
+what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they
+pass through my mind, just as they use to be when we converse together on
+these or any other subjects when we saunter alone, or, as we have often
+done with good Arbuthnot and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick’s, among the
+multiplied scenes of your little garden.  That theatre is large enough
+for my ambition.  I dare not pretend to instruct mankind, and I am not
+humble enough to write to the public for any other purpose.  I mean by
+writing on such subjects as I intend here, to make some trial of my
+progress in search of the most important truths, and to make this trial
+before a friend in whom I think I may confide.  These epistolary essays,
+therefore, will be written with as little regard to form and with as
+little reserve as I used to show in the conversations which have given
+occasion to them, when I maintained the same opinions and insisted on the
+same reasons in defence of them.
+
+It might seem strange to a man not well acquainted with the world, and in
+particular with the philosophical and theological tribe, that so much
+precaution should be necessary in the communication of our thoughts on
+any subject of the first philosophy, which is of common concern to the
+whole race of mankind, and wherein no one can have, according to nature
+and truth, any separate interest.  Yet so it is.  The separate interests
+we cannot have by God’s institutions, are created by those of man; and
+there is no subject on which men deal more unfairly with one another than
+this.  There are separate interests, to mention them in general only, of
+prejudice and of profession.  By the first, men set out in the search of
+truth under the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations
+often to such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they
+have, the madder they grow.  By the second, they are sworn, as it were,
+to follow all their lives the authority of some particular school, to
+which “tanquam scopulo, adhærescunt;” for the condition of their
+engagement is to defend certain doctrines, and even mere forms of speech,
+without examination, or to examine only in order to defend them.  By
+both, they become philosophers as men became Christians in the primitive
+Church, or as they determined themselves about disputed doctrines; for
+says Hilarius, writing to St. Austin, “Your holiness knows that the
+greatest part of the faithful embrace, or refuse to embrace, a doctrine
+for no reason but the impression which the name and authority of some
+body or other makes on them.”  What now can a man who seeks truth for the
+sake of truth, and is indifferent where he finds it, expect from any
+communication of his thoughts to such men as these?  He will be much
+deceived if he expects anything better than imposition or altercation.
+
+Few men have, I believe, consulted others, both the living and the dead,
+with less presumption, and in a greater spirit of docility, than I have
+done: and the more I have consulted, the less have I found of that inward
+conviction on which a mind that is not absolutely implicit can rest.  I
+thought for a time that this must be my fault.  I distrusted myself, not
+my teachers—men of the greatest name, ancient and modern.  But I found at
+last that it was safer to trust myself than them, and to proceed by the
+light of my own understanding than to wander after these _ignes fatui_ of
+philosophy.  If I am able therefore to tell you easily, and at the same
+time so clearly and distinctly as to be easily understood, and so
+strongly as not to be easily refuted, how I have thought for myself, I
+shall be persuaded that I have thought enough on these subjects.  If I am
+not able to do this, it will be evident that I have not thought on them
+enough.  I must review my opinions, discover and correct my errors.
+
+I have said that the subjects I mean, and which will be the principal
+objects of these essays, are those of the first philosophy; and it is
+fit, therefore, that I should explain what I understand by the first
+philosophy.  Do not imagine that I understand what has passed commonly
+under that name—metaphysical pneumatics, for instance, or ontology.  The
+first are conversant about imaginary substances, such as may and may not
+exist.  That there is a God we can demonstrate; and although we know
+nothing of His manner of being, yet we acknowledge Him to be immaterial,
+because a thousand absurdities, and such as imply the strongest
+contradiction, result from the supposition that the Supreme Being is a
+system of matter.  But of any other spirits we neither have nor can have
+any knowledge: and no man will be inquisitive about spiritual
+physiognomy, nor go about to inquire, I believe, at this time, as Evodius
+inquired of St. Austin, whether our immaterial part, the soul, does not
+remain united, when it forsakes this gross terrestrial body, to some
+ethereal body more subtile and more fine; which was one of the
+Pythagorean and Platonic whimsies: nor be under any concern to know, if
+this be not the case of the dead, how souls can be distinguished after
+their separation—that of Dives, for example, from that of Lazarus.  The
+second—that is, ontology—treats most scientifically of being abstracted
+from all being (“de ente quatenus ens”).  It came in fashion whilst
+Aristotle was in fashion, and has been spun into an immense web out of
+scholastic brains.  But it should be, and I think it is already, left to
+the acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the
+schools, and to other German wits.  Let them darken by tedious
+definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their
+vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible jargon,
+which is supposed to express such abstractions as they cannot make, and
+according to which, however, they presume often to control the particular
+and most evident truths of experimental knowledge.  Such reputed science
+deserves no rank in philosophy, not the last, and much less the first.
+
+I desire you not to imagine neither that I understand by the first
+philosophy even such a science as my Lord Bacon describes—a science of
+general observations and axioms, such as do not belong properly to any
+particular part of science, but are common to many, “and of an higher
+stage,” as he expresses himself.  He complains that philosophers have not
+gone up to the “spring-head,” which would be of “general and excellent
+use for the disclosing of Nature and the abridgment of art,” though they
+“draw now and then a bucket of water out of the well for some particular
+use.”  I respect—no man more—this great authority; but I respect no
+authority enough to subscribe on the faith of it, to that which appears
+to me fantastical, as if it were real.  Now this spring-head of science
+is purely fantastical, and the figure conveys a false notion to the mind,
+as figures employed licentiously are apt to do.  The great author himself
+calls these axioms, which are to constitute his first philosophy,
+observations.  Such they are properly; for there are some uniform
+principles, or uniform impressions of the same nature, to be observed in
+very different subjects, “una eademque naturæ vestigia aut signacula
+diversis materiis et subjectis impressa.”  These observations, therefore,
+when they are sufficiently verified and well established, may be properly
+applied in discourse, or writing, from one subject to another.  But I
+apprehend that when they are so applied, they serve rather to illustrate
+a proposition than to disclose Nature, or to abridge art.  They may have
+a better foundation than similitudes and comparisons more loosely and
+more superficially made.  They may compare realities, not appearances;
+things that Nature has made alike, not things that seem only to have some
+relation of this kind in our imaginations.  But still they are
+comparisons of things distinct and independent.  They do not lead us to
+things, but things that are lead us to make them.  He who possesses two
+sciences, and the same will be often true of arts, may find in certain
+respects a similitude between them because he possesses both.  If he did
+not possess both, he would be led by neither to the acquisition of the
+other.  Such observations are effects, not means of knowledge; and,
+therefore, to suppose that any collection of them can constitute a
+science of an “higher stage,” from whence we may reason _à priori_ down
+to particulars, is, I presume, to suppose something very groundless, and
+very useless at best, to the advancement of knowledge.  A pretended
+science of this kind must be barren of knowledge, and may be fruitful of
+error, as the Persian magic was, if it proceeded on the faint analogy
+that may be discovered between physics and politics, and deduced the
+rules of civil government from what the professors of it observed of the
+operations and works of Nature in the material world.  The very specimen
+of their magic which my Lord Bacon has given would be sufficient to
+justify what is here objected to his doctrine.
+
+Let us conclude this head by mentioning two examples among others which
+he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy.
+The first is this axiom, “If to unequals you add equals, all will be
+unequal.”  This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of
+mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between
+commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical
+proportion.  But I would ask in my turn whether the certainty that any
+arithmetician or geometrician has of the arithmetical or geometrical
+truth will lead him to discover this coincidence.  I ask whether the most
+profound lawyer who never heard perhaps this axiom would be led to it by
+his notions of commutative and distributive justice.  Certainly not.  He
+who is well skilled in arithmetic or geometry, and in jurisprudence, may
+observe perhaps this uniformity of natural principle or impression
+because he is so skilled, though, to say the truth, it be not very
+obvious; but he will not have derived his knowledge of it from any
+spring-head of a first philosophy, from any science of an “higher stage”
+than arithmetic, geometry, and jurisprudence.
+
+The second example is this axiom, “That the destruction of things is
+prevented by the reduction of them to their first principles.”  This rule
+is said to hold in religion, in physics, and in politics; and Machiavel
+is quoted for having established it in the last of these.  Now though
+this axiom be generally, it is not universally, true; and, to say nothing
+of physics, it will not be hard to produce, in contradiction to it,
+examples of religious and civil institutions that would have perished if
+they had been kept strictly to their first principles, and that have been
+supported by departing more or less from them.  It may seem justly matter
+of wonder that the author of the “Advancement of Learning” should espouse
+this maxim in religion and politics, as well as physics, so absolutely,
+and that he should place it as an axiom of his first philosophy
+relatively to the three, since he could not do it without falling into
+the abuse he condemns so much in his “Organum Novum”—the abuse
+philosophers are guilty of when they suffer the mind to rise too fast, as
+it is apt to do, from particulars to remote and general axioms.  That the
+author of the “Political Discourses” should fall into this abuse is not
+at all strange.  The same abuse runs through all his writings, in which,
+among many wise and many wicked reflections and precepts, he establishes
+frequently general maxims or rules of conduct on a few particular
+examples, and sometimes on a single example.  Upon the whole matter, one
+of these axioms communicates no knowledge but that which we must have
+before we can know the axiom, and the other may betray us into great
+error when we apply it to use and action.  One is unprofitable, the other
+dangerous; and the philosophy which admits them as principles of general
+knowledge deserves ill to be reputed philosophy.  It would have been just
+as useful, and much more safe, to admit into this receptacle of axioms
+those self-evident and necessary truths alone of which we have an
+immediate perception, since they are not confined to any special parts of
+science, but are common to several, or to all.  Thus these profitable
+axioms, “What is, is,” “The whole is bigger than a part,” and divers
+others, might serve to enlarge the spring-head of a first philosophy, and
+be of excellent use in arguing _ex prœcognitis et prœconcessis_.
+
+If you ask me now what I understand then by a first philosophy, my answer
+will be such as I suppose you already prepared to receive.  I understand
+by a first philosophy, that which deserves the first place on account of
+the dignity and importance of its objects, natural theology or theism,
+and natural religion or ethics.  If we consider the order of the sciences
+in their rise and progress, the first place belongs to natural
+philosophy, the mother of them all, or the trunk, the tree of knowledge,
+out of which, and in proportion to which, like so many branches, they all
+grow.  These branches spread wide, and bear even fruits of different
+kinds.  But the sap that made them shoot, and makes them flourish, rises
+from the root through the trunk, and their productions are varied
+according to the variety of strainers through which it flows.  In plain
+terms, I speak not here of supernatural, or revealed science; and
+therefore I say that all science, if it be real, must rise from below,
+and from our own level.  It cannot descend from above, nor from superior
+systems of being and knowledge.  Truth of existence is truth of
+knowledge, and therefore reason searches after them in one of these
+scenes, where both are to be found together, and are within our reach;
+whilst imagination hopes fondly to find them in another, where both of
+them are to be found, but surely not by us.  The notices we receive from
+without concerning the beings that surround us, and the inward
+consciousness we have of our own, are the foundations, and the true
+criterions too, of all the knowledge we acquire of body and of mind: and
+body and mind are objects alike of natural philosophy.  We assume
+commonly that they are two distinct substances.  Be it so.  They are
+still united, and blended, as it were, together, in one human nature: and
+all natures, united or not, fall within the province of natural
+philosophy.  On the hypothesis indeed that body and soul are two distinct
+substances, one of which subsists after the dissolution of the other,
+certain men, who have taken the whimsical title of metaphysicians, as if
+they had science beyond the bounds of Nature, or of Nature discoverable
+by others, have taken likewise to themselves the doctrine of mind; and
+have left that of body, under the name of physics, to a supposed inferior
+order of philosophers.  But the right of these stands good; for all the
+knowledge that can be acquired about mind, or the unextended substance of
+the Cartesians, must be acquired, like that about body, or the extended
+substance, within the bounds of their province, and by the means they
+employ, particular experiments and observations.  Nothing can be true of
+mind, any more than of body, that is repugnant to these; and an
+intellectual hypothesis which is not supported by the intellectual
+phenomena is at least as ridiculous as a corporeal hypothesis which is
+not supported by the corporeal phenomena.
+
+If I have said thus much in this place concerning natural philosophy, it
+has not been without good reason.  I consider theology and ethics as the
+first of sciences in pre-eminence of rank.  But I consider the constant
+contemplation of Nature—by which I mean the whole system of God’s works
+as far as it lies open to us—as the common spring of all sciences, and
+even of these.  What has been said agreeably to this notion seems to me
+evidently true; and yet metaphysical divines and philosophers proceed in
+direct contradiction to it, and have thereby, if I mistake not,
+bewildered themselves, and a great part of mankind, in such inextricable
+labyrinths of hypothetical reasoning, that few men can find their way
+back, and none can find it forward into the road of truth.  To dwell
+long, and on some points always, in particular knowledge, tires the
+patience of these impetuous philosophers.  They fly to generals.  To
+consider attentively even the minutest phenomena of body and mind
+mortifies their pride.  Rather than creep up slowly, _à posteriori_, to a
+little general knowledge, they soar at once as far and as high as
+imagination can carry them.  From thence they descend again, armed with
+systems and arguments _à priori_; and, regardless how these agree or
+clash with the phenomena of Nature, they impose them on mankind.
+
+It is this manner of philosophising, this preposterous method of
+beginning our search after truth out of the bounds of human knowledge, or
+of continuing it beyond them, that has corrupted natural theology and
+natural religion in all ages.  They have been corrupted to such a degree
+that it is grown, and was so long since, as necessary to plead the cause
+of God, if I may use this expression after Seneca, against the divine as
+against the atheist; to assert his existence against the latter, to
+defend his attributes against the former, and to justify his providence
+against both.  To both a sincere and humble theist might say very
+properly, “I make no difference between you on many occasions, because it
+is indifferent whether you deny or defame the Supreme Being.”  Nay,
+Plutarch, though little orthodox in theology, was not in the wrong
+perhaps when he declared the last to be the worst.
+
+In treating the subjects about which I shall write to you in these
+letters or essays, it will be therefore necessary to distinguish genuine
+and pure theism from the unnatural and profane mixtures of human
+imagination—what we can know of God from what we cannot know.  This is
+the more necessary, too, because, whilst true and false notions about God
+and religion are blended together in our minds under one specious name of
+science, the false are more likely to make men doubt of the true, as it
+often happens, than to persuade men that they are true themselves.  Now,
+in order to this purpose, nothing can be more effectual than to go to the
+root of error, of that primitive error which encourages our curiosity,
+sustains our pride, fortifies our prejudices, and gives pretence to
+delusion.  This primitive error consists in the high opinion we are apt
+to entertain of the human mind, though it holds, in truth, a very low
+rank in the intellectual system.  To cure this error we need only turn
+our eyes inward, and contemplate impartially what passes there from the
+infancy to the maturity of the mind.  Thus it will not be difficult, and
+thus alone it is possible, to discover the true nature of human
+knowledge—how far it extends, how far it is real, and where and how it
+begins to be fantastical.
+
+Such an inquiry, if it cannot check the presumption nor humble the pride
+of metaphysicians, may serve to undeceive others.  Locke pursued it; he
+grounded all he taught on the phenomena of Nature; he appealed to the
+experience and conscious knowledge of every one, and rendered all he
+advanced intelligible.  Leibnitz, one of the vainest and most chimerical
+men that ever got a name in philosophy, and who is often so
+unintelligible that no man ought to believe he understood himself,
+censured Locke as a superficial philosopher.  What has happened?  The
+philosophy of one has forced its way into general approbation, that of
+the other has carried no conviction and scarce any information to those
+who have misspent their time about it.  To speak the truth, though it may
+seem a paradox, our knowledge on many subjects, and particularly on those
+which we intend here, must be superficial to be real.  This is the
+condition of humanity.  We are placed, as it were, in an intellectual
+twilight, where we discover but few things clearly, and none entirely,
+and yet see just enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and
+more discoveries.  Thus flattered, men push their inquiries on, and may
+be properly enough compared to Ixion, who “imagined he had Juno in his
+arms whilst he embraced a cloud.”
+
+To be contented to know things as God has made us capable of knowing them
+is, then, a first principle necessary to secure us from falling into
+error; and if there is any subject upon which we should be most on our
+guard against error, it is surely that which I have called here the first
+philosophy.  God is hid from us in the majesty of His nature, and the
+little we discover of Him must be discovered by the light that is
+reflected from His works.  Out of this light, therefore, we should never
+go in our inquiries and reasonings about His nature, His attributes, and
+the order of His providence; and yet upon these subjects men depart the
+furthest from it—nay, they who depart the furthest are the best heard by
+the bulk of mankind.  The less men know, the more they believe that they
+know.  Belief passes in their minds for knowledge, and the very
+circumstances which should beget doubt produce increase of faith.  Every
+glittering apparition that is pointed out to them in the vast wild of
+imagination passes for a reality; and the more distant, the more
+confused, the more incomprehensible it is, the more sublime it is
+esteemed.  He who should attempt to shift these scenes of airy vision for
+those of real knowledge might expect to be treated with scorn and anger
+by the whole theological and metaphysical tribe, the masters and the
+scholars; he would be despised as a plebeian philosopher, and railed at
+as an infidel.  It would be sounded high that he debased human nature,
+which has a “cognation,” so the reverend and learned Doctor Cudworth
+calls it, with the divine; that the soul of man, immaterial and immortal
+by its nature, was made to contemplate higher and nobler objects than
+this sensible world, and even than itself, since it was made to
+contemplate God and to be united to Him.  In such clamour as this the
+voice of truth and of reason would be drowned, and, with both of them on
+his side, he who opposed it would make many enemies and few converts—nay,
+I am apt to think that some of these, if he made any, would say to him,
+as soon as the gaudy visions of error were dispelled, and till they were
+accustomed to the simplicity of truth, “Pol me occidistis.”  Prudence
+forbids me, therefore, to write as I think to the world, whilst
+friendship forbids me to write otherwise to you.  I have been a martyr of
+faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in philosophy.
+
+But there is another consideration which deserves more regard, because it
+is of a public nature, and because the common interests of society may be
+affected by it.  Truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance,
+revelations of the Creator, inventions of the creature, dictates of
+reason, sallies of enthusiasm, have been blended so long together in our
+systems of theology that it may be thought dangerous to separate them,
+lest by attacking some parts of these systems we should shake the whole.
+It may be thought that error itself deserves to be respected on this
+account, and that men who are deluded for their good should be deluded
+on.
+
+Some such reflections as these it is probable that Erasmus made when he
+observed, in one of his letters to Melancthon, that Plato, dreaming of a
+philosophical commonwealth, saw the impossibility of governing the
+multitude without deceiving them.  “Let not Christians lie,” says this
+great divine: “but let it not be thought neither that every truth ought
+to be thrown out to the vulgar.”  (“Non expedit omnem veritatem prodere
+vulgo.”)  Scævola and Varro were more explicit than Erasmus, and more
+reasonable than Plato.  They held not only that many truths were to be
+concealed from the vulgar, but that it was expedient the vulgar should
+believe many things that were false.  They distinguished at the same
+time, very rightly, between the regard due to religions already
+established, and the conduct to be held in the establishment of them.
+The Greek assumed that men could not be governed by truth, and erected on
+this principle a fabulous theology.  The Romans were not of the same
+opinion.  Varro declared expressly that if he had been to frame a new
+institution, he would have framed it “ex naturæ potius formula.”  But
+they both thought that things evidently false might deserve an outward
+respect when they are interwoven into a system of government.  This
+outward respect every good citizen will show them in such a case, and
+they can claim no more in any.  He will not propagate these errors, but
+he will be cautious how he propagates even truth in opposition to them.
+
+There has been much noise made about free-thinking; and men have been
+animated in the contest by a spirit that becomes neither the character of
+divines nor that of good citizens, by an arbitrary tyrannical spirit
+under the mask of religious zeal, and by a presumptuous factious spirit
+under that of liberty.  If the first could prevail, they would establish
+implicit belief and blind obedience, and an Inquisition to maintain this
+abject servitude.  To assert antipodes might become once more as
+heretical as Arianism or Pelagianism; and men might be dragged to the
+jails of some Holy Office, like Galilei, for saying they had seen what in
+fact they had seen, and what every one else that pleased might see.  If
+the second could prevail, they would destroy at once the general
+influence of religion by shaking the foundations of it which education
+had laid.  These are wide extremes.  Is there no middle path in which a
+reasonable man and a good citizen may direct his steps?  I think there
+is.
+
+Every one has an undoubted right to think freely—nay, it is the duty of
+every one to do so as far as he has the necessary means and
+opportunities.  This duty, too, is in no case so incumbent on him as in
+those that regard what I call the first philosophy.  They who have
+neither means nor opportunities of this sort must submit their opinions
+to authority; and to what authority can they resign themselves so
+properly and so safely as to that of the laws and constitution of their
+country?  In general, nothing can be more absurd than to take opinions of
+the greatest moment, and such as concern us the most intimately, on
+trust; but there is no help against it in many particular cases.  Things
+the most absurd in speculation become necessary in practice.  Such is the
+human constitution, and reason excuses them on the account of this
+necessity.  Reason does even a little more, and it is all she can do.
+She gives the best direction possible to the absurdity.  Thus she directs
+those who must believe because they cannot know, to believe in the laws
+of their country, and conform their opinions and practice to those of
+their ancestors, to those of Coruncanius, of Scipio, of Scævola—not to
+those of Zeno, of Cleanthes, of Chrysippus.
+
+But now the same reason that gives this direction to such men as these
+will give a very contrary direction to those who have the means and
+opportunities the others want.  Far from advising them to submit to this
+mental bondage, she will advise them to employ their whole industry to
+exert the utmost freedom of thought, and to rest on no authority but
+hers—that is, their own.  She will speak to them in the language of the
+Soufys, a sect of philosophers in Persia that travellers have mentioned.
+“Doubt,” say these wise and honest freethinkers, “is the key of
+knowledge.  He who never doubts, never examines.  He who never examines,
+discovers nothing.  He who discovers nothing, is blind and will remain
+so.  If you find no reason to doubt concerning the opinions of your
+fathers, keep to them; they will be sufficient for you.  If you find any
+reason to doubt concerning them, seek the truth quietly, but take care
+not to disturb the minds of other men.”
+
+Let us proceed agreeably to these maxims.  Let us seek truth, but seek it
+quietly as well as freely.  Let us not imagine, like some who are called
+freethinkers, that every man, who can think and judge for himself, as he
+has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking, any more than of
+acting, according to the full freedom of his thoughts.  The freedom
+belongs to him as a rational creature; he lies under the restraint as a
+member of society.
+
+If the religion we profess contained nothing more than articles of faith
+and points of doctrine clearly revealed to us in the Gospel, we might be
+obliged to renounce our natural freedom of thought in favour of this
+supernatural authority.  But since it is notorious that a certain order
+of men, who call themselves the Church, have been employed to make and
+propagate a theological system of their own, which they call
+Christianity, from the days of the Apostles, and even from these days
+inclusively, it is our duty to examine and analyse the whole, that we may
+distinguish what is divine from what is human; adhere to the first
+implicitly, and ascribe to the last no more authority than the word of
+man deserves.
+
+Such an examination is the more necessary to be undertaken by every one
+who is concerned for the truth of his religion and for the honour of
+Christianity, because the first preachers of it were not, and they who
+preach it still are not, agreed about many of the most important points
+of their system; because the controversies raised by these men have
+banished union, peace, and charity out of the Christian world; and
+because some parts of the system savour so much of superstition and
+enthusiasm that all the prejudices of education and the whole weight of
+civil and ecclesiastical power can hardly keep them in credit.  These
+considerations deserve the more attention because nothing can be more
+true than what Plutarch said of old, and my Lord Bacon has said since:
+one, that superstition, and the other, that vain controversies are
+principal causes of atheism.
+
+I neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the
+present system of Christianity.  I should fear an attempt to alter the
+established religion as much as they who have the most bigot attachment
+to it, and for reasons as good as theirs, though not entirely the same.
+I speak only of the duty of every private man to examine for himself,
+which would have an immediate good effect relatively to himself, and
+might have in time a good effect relatively to the public, since it would
+dispose the minds of men to a greater indifference about theological
+disputes, which are the disgrace of Christianity and have been the
+plagues of the world.
+
+Will you tell me that private judgment must submit to the established
+authority of Fathers and Councils?  My answer shall be that the Fathers,
+ancient and modern, in Councils and out of them, have raised that immense
+system of artificial theology by which genuine Christianity is perverted
+and in which it is lost.  These Fathers are fathers of the worst sort,
+such as contrive to keep their children in a perpetual state of infancy,
+that they may exercise perpetual and absolute dominion over them.  “Quo
+magis regnum in illos exerceant pro sua libidine.”  I call their theology
+artificial, because it is in a multitude of instances conformable neither
+to the religion of Nature nor to Gospel Christianity, but often repugnant
+to both, though said to be founded on them.  I shall have occasion to
+mention several such instances in the course of these little essays.
+Here I will only observe that if it be hard to conceive how anything so
+absurd as the pagan theology stands represented by the Fathers who wrote
+against it, and as it really was, could ever gain credit among rational
+creatures, it is full as hard to conceive how the artificial theology we
+speak of could ever prevail, not only in ages of ignorance, but in the
+most enlightened.  There is a letter of St. Austin wherein he says that
+he was ashamed of himself when he refuted the opinions of the former, and
+that he was ashamed of mankind when he considered that such absurdities
+were received and defended.  The reflections might be retorted on the
+saint, since he broached and defended doctrines as unworthy of the
+Supreme All-Perfect Being as those which the heathens taught concerning
+their fictitious and inferior gods.  Is it necessary to quote any other
+than that by which we are taught that God has created numbers of men for
+no purpose but to damn them?  “Quisquis prædestinationis doctrinam
+invidia gravat,” says Calvin, “aperte maledicit Deo.”  Let us say,
+“Quisquis prædestinationis doctrinam asserit, blasphemat”.  Let us not
+impute such cruel injustice to the all-perfect Being.  Let Austin and
+Calvin and all those who teach it be answerable for it alone.  You may
+bring Fathers and Councils as evidences in the cause of artificial
+theology, but reason must be the judge; and all I contend for is, that
+she should be so in the breast of every Christian that can appeal to her
+tribunal.
+
+Will you tell me that even such a private examination of the Christian
+system as I propose that every man who is able to make it should make for
+himself, is unlawful; and that, if any doubts arise in our minds
+concerning religion, we must have recourse for the solution of them to
+some of that holy order which was instituted, by God Himself, and which
+has been continued by the imposition of hands in every Christian society,
+from the Apostles down to the present clergy?  My answer shall be shortly
+this: it is repugnant to all the ideas of wisdom and goodness to believe
+that the universal terms of salvation are knowable by the means of one
+order of men alone, and that they continue to be so even after they have
+been published to all nations.  Some of your directors will tell you that
+whilst Christ was on earth the Apostles were the Church; that He was the
+Bishop of it; that afterwards the admission of men into this order was
+approved, and confirmed by visions and other divine manifestations; and
+that these wonderful proofs of God’s interposition at the ordinations and
+consecrations of presbyters and bishops lasted even in the time of St.
+Cyprian—that is, in the middle of the third century.  It is pity that
+they lasted no longer, for the honour of the Church, and for the
+conviction of those who do not sufficiently reverence the religious
+society.  It were to be wished, perhaps, that some of the secrets of
+electricity were improved enough to be piously and usefully applied to
+this purpose.  If we beheld a shekinah, or divine presence, like the
+flame of a taper, on the heads of those who receive the imposition of
+hands, we might believe that they receive the Holy Ghost at the same
+time.  But as we have no reason to believe what superstitious, credulous,
+or lying men (such as Cyprian himself was) reported formerly, that they
+might establish the proud pretensions of the clergy, so we have no reason
+to believe that five men of this order have any more of the Divine Spirit
+in our time, after they are ordained, than they had before.  It would be
+a farce to provoke laughter, if there was no suspicion of profanation in
+it, to see them gravely lay hands on one another, and bid one another
+receive the Holy Ghost.
+
+Will you tell me finally, in opposition to what has been said, and that
+you may anticipate what remains to be said, that laymen are not only
+unauthorised, but quite unequal, without the assistance of divines, to
+the task I propose?  If you do, I shall make no scruple to tell you, in
+return, that laymen may be, if they please, in every respect as fit, and
+are in one important respect more fit than divines to go through this
+examination, and to judge for themselves upon it.  We say that the
+Scriptures, concerning the divine authenticity of which all the
+professors of Christianity agree, are the sole criterion of Christianity.
+You add tradition, concerning which there may be, and there is, much
+dispute.  We have, then, a certain invariable rule whenever the
+Scriptures speak plainly.  Whenever they do not speak so, we have this
+comfortable assurance—that doctrines which nobody understands are
+revealed to nobody, and are therefore improper objects of human inquiry.
+We know, too, that if we receive the explanations and commentaries of
+these dark sayings from the clergy, we take the greatest part of our
+religion from the word of man, not from the Word of God.  Tradition,
+indeed, however derived, is not to be totally rejected; for if it was,
+how came the canon of the Scriptures, even of the Gospels, to be fixed?
+How was it conveyed down to us?  Traditions of general facts, and general
+propositions plain and uniform, may be of some authority and use.  But
+particular anecdotical traditions, whose original authority is unknown,
+or justly suspicious, and that have acquired only an appearance of
+generality and notoriety, because they have been frequently and boldly
+repeated from age to age, deserve no more regard than doctrines evidently
+added to the Scriptures, under pretence of explaining and commenting
+them, by men as fallible as ourselves.  We may receive the Scriptures,
+and be persuaded of their authenticity, on the faith of ecclesiastical
+tradition; but it seems to me that we may reject, at the same time, all
+the artificial theology which has been raised on these Scriptures by
+doctors of the Church, with as much right as they receive the Old
+Testament on the authority of Jewish scribes and doctors whilst they
+reject the oral law and all rabbinical literature.
+
+He who examines on such principles as these, which are conformable to
+truth and reason, may lay aside at once the immense volumes of Fathers
+and Councils, of schoolmen, casuists, and controversial writers, which
+have perplexed the world so long.  Natural religion will be to such a man
+no longer intricate, revealed religion will be no longer mysterious, nor
+the Word of God equivocal.  Clearness and precision are two great
+excellences of human laws.  How much more should we expect to find them
+in the law of God?  They have been banished from thence by artificial
+theology, and he who is desirous to find them must banish the professors
+of it from his councils, instead of consulting them.  He must seek for
+genuine Christianity with that simplicity of spirit with which it is
+taught in the Gospel by Christ Himself.  He must do the very reverse of
+what has been done by the persons you advise him to consult.
+
+You see that I have said what has been said, on a supposition that,
+however obscure theology may be, the Christian religion is extremely
+plain, and requires no great learning nor deep meditation to develop it.
+But if it was not so plain, if both these were necessary to develop it,
+is great learning the monopoly of the clergy since the resurrection of
+letters, as a little learning was before that era?  Is deep meditation
+and justness of reasoning confined to men of that order by a peculiar and
+exclusive privilege?  In short, and to ask a question which experience
+will decide, have these men who boast that they are appointed by God “to
+be the interpreters of His secret will, to represent His person, and to
+answer in His name, as it were, out of the sanctuary”—have these men, I
+say, been able in more than seventeen centuries to establish an uniform
+system of revealed religion—for natural religion never wanted their help
+among the civil societies of Christians—or even in their own?  They do
+not seem to have aimed at this desirable end.  Divided as they have
+always been, they have always studied in order to believe, and to take
+upon trust, or to find matter of discourse, or to contradict and confute,
+but never to consider impartially nor to use a free judgment.  On the
+contrary, they who have attempted to use this freedom of judgment have
+been constantly and cruelly persecuted by them.
+
+The first steps towards the establishment of artificial theology, which
+has passed for Christianity ever since, were enthusiastical.  They were
+not heretics alone who delighted in wild allegories and the pompous
+jargon of mystery; they were the orthodox Fathers of the first ages, they
+were the disciples of the Apostles, or the scholars of their disciples;
+for the truth of which I may appeal to the epistles and other writings of
+these men that are extant—to those of Clemens, of Ignatius, or of
+Irenæus, for instance—and to the visions of Hermes, that have so near a
+resemblance to the productions of Bunyan.
+
+The next steps of the same kind were rhetorical.  They were made by men
+who declaimed much and reasoned ill, but who imposed on the imaginations
+of others by the heat of their own, by their hyperboles, their
+exaggerations, the acrimony of their style, and their violent invectives.
+Such were the Chrysostoms, the Jeromes, an Hilarius, a Cyril, and most of
+the Fathers.
+
+The last of the steps I shall mention were logical, and these were made
+very opportunely and very advantageously for the Church and for
+artificial theology.  Absurdity in speculation and superstition in
+practice had been cultivated so long, and were become so gross, that men
+began to see through the veils that had been thrown over them, as
+ignorant as those ages were.  Then the schoolmen arose.  I need not
+display their character; it is enough known.  This only I will say—that
+having very few materials of knowledge and much subtilty of wit they
+wrought up systems of fancy on the little they knew, and invented an art,
+by the help of Aristotle, not of enlarging, but of puzzling, knowledge
+with technical terms, with definitions, distinctions, and syllogisms
+merely verbal.  They taught what they could not explain, evaded what they
+could not answer, and he who had the most skill in this art might put to
+silence, when it came into general use, the man who was consciously
+certain that he had truth and reason on his side.
+
+The authority of the schools lasted till the resurrection of letters.
+But as soon as real knowledge was enlarged, and the conduct of the
+understanding better understood, it fell into contempt.  The advocates of
+artificial theology have had since that time a very hard task.  They have
+been obliged to defend in the light what was imposed in the dark, and to
+acquire knowledge to justify ignorance.  They were drawn to it with
+reluctance.  But learning, that grew up among the laity, and
+controversies with one another, made this unavoidable, which was not
+eligible on the principles of ecclesiastical policy.  They have done with
+these new arms all that great parts, great pains, and great zeal could do
+under such disadvantages, and we may apply to this order, on this
+occasion, “si Pergama dextra,” etc.  But their Troy cannot be defended;
+irreparable breaches have been made in it.  They have improved in
+learning and knowledge, but this improvement has been general, and as
+remarkable at least among the laity as among the clergy.  Besides which
+it must be owned that the former have had in this respect a sort of
+indirect obligation to the latter; for whilst these men have searched
+into antiquity, have improved criticism, and almost exhausted subtilty,
+they have furnished so many arms the more to such of the others as do not
+submit implicitly to them, but examine and judge for themselves.  By
+refuting one another, when they differ, they have made it no hard matter
+to refute them all when they agree.  And I believe there are few books
+written to propagate or defend the received notions of artificial
+theology which may not be refuted by the books themselves.  I conclude,
+on the whole, that laymen have, or need to have, no want of the clergy in
+examining and analysing the religion they profess.
+
+But I said that they are in one important respect more fit to go through
+this examination without the help of divines than with it.  A layman who
+seeks the truth may fall into error; but as he can have no interest to
+deceive himself, so he has none of profession to bias his private
+judgment, any more than to engage him to deceive others.  Now, the
+clergyman lies strongly under this influence in every communion.  How,
+indeed, should it be otherwise?  Theology is become one of those sciences
+which Seneca calls “scientiæ in lucrum exeuntes;” and sciences, like arts
+whose object is gain, are, in good English, trades.  Such theology is,
+and men who could make no fortune, except the lowest, in any other, make
+often the highest in this; for the proof of which assertion I might
+produce some signal instances among my lords the bishops.  The
+consequence has been uniform; for how ready soever the tradesmen of one
+Church are to expose the false wares—that is, the errors and abuses—of
+another, they never admit that there are any in their own; and he who
+admitted this in some particular instance would be driven out of the
+ecclesiastical company as a false brother and one who spoiled the trade.
+
+Thus it comes to pass that new Churches may be established by the
+dissensions, but that old ones cannot be reformed by the concurrence, of
+the clergy.  There is no composition to be made with this order of men.
+He who does not believe all they teach in every communion is reputed
+nearly as criminal as he who believes no part of it.  He who cannot
+assent to the Athanasian Creed, of which Archbishop Tillotson said, as I
+have heard, that he wished we were well rid, would receive no better
+quarter than an atheist from the generality of the clergy.  What recourse
+now has a man who cannot be thus implicit?  Some have run into
+scepticism, some into atheism, and, for fear of being imposed on by
+others, have imposed on themselves.  The way to avoid these extremes is
+that which has been chalked out in this introduction.  We may think
+freely without thinking as licentiously as divines do when they raise a
+system of imagination on true foundations, or as sceptics do when they
+renounce all knowledge, or as atheists do when they attempt to demolish
+the foundations of all religion and reject demonstration.  As we think
+for ourselves, we may keep our thoughts to ourselves, or communicate them
+with a due reserve and in such a manner only as it may be done without
+offending the laws of our country and disturbing the public peace.
+
+I cannot conclude my discourse on this occasion better than by putting
+you in mind of a passage you quoted to me once, with great applause, from
+a sermon of Foster, and to this effect: “Where mystery begins, religion
+ends.”  The apophthegm pleased me much, and I was glad to hear such a
+truth from any pulpit, since it shows an inclination, at least, to purify
+Christianity from the leaven of artificial theology, which consists
+principally in making things that are very plain mysterious, and in
+pretending to make things that are impenetrably mysterious very plain.
+If you continue still of the same mind, I shall have no excuse to make to
+you for what I have written and shall write.  Our opinions coincide.  If
+you have changed your mind, think again and examine further.  You will
+find that it is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a
+real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths.  One follows
+Nature and Nature’s God—that is, he follows God in His works and in His
+Word; nor presumes to go further, by metaphysical and theological
+commentaries of his own invention, than the two texts, if I may use this
+expression, carry him very evidently.  They who have done otherwise, and
+have affected to discover, by a supposed science derived from tradition
+or taught in the schools, more than they who have not such science can
+discover concerning the nature, physical and moral, of the Supreme Being,
+and concerning the secrets of His providence, have been either
+enthusiasts or knaves, or else of that numerous tribe who reason well
+very often, but reason always on some arbitrary supposition.
+
+Much of this character belonged to the heathen divines, and it is in all
+its parts peculiarly that of the ancient Fathers and modern doctors of
+the Christian Church.  The former had reason, but no revelation, to guide
+them; and though reason be always one, we cannot wonder that different
+prejudices and different tempers of imagination warped it in them on such
+subjects as these, and produced all the extravagances of their theology.
+The latter had not the excuse of human frailty to make in mitigation of
+their presumption.  On the contrary, the consideration of this frailty,
+inseparable from their nature, aggravated their presumption.  They had a
+much surer criterion than human reason; they had divine reason and the
+Word of God to guide them and to limit their inquiries.  How came they to
+go beyond this criterion?  Many of the first preachers were led into it
+because they preached or wrote before there was any such criterion
+established, in the acceptance of which they all agreed, because they
+preached or wrote, in the meantime, on the faith of tradition and on a
+confidence that they were persons extraordinarily gifted.  Other reasons
+succeeded these.  Skill in languages, not the gift of tongues, some
+knowledge of the Jewish cabala and some of heathen philosophy, of Plato’s
+especially, made them presume to comment, and under that pretence to
+enlarge the system of Christianity with as much licence as they could
+have taken if the word of man, instead of the Word of God, had been
+concerned, and they had commented the civil, not the divine, law.  They
+did this so copiously that, to give one instance of it, the exposition of
+St. Matthew’s Gospel took up ninety homilies, and that of St. John’s
+eighty-seven, in the works of Chrysostom; which puts me in mind of a
+Puritanical parson who, if I mistake not—for I have never looked into the
+folio since I was a boy and condemned sometimes to read in it—made one
+hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm.
+
+Now all these men, both heathens and Christians, appeared gigantic forms
+through the false medium of imagination and habitual prejudice; but were,
+in truth, as arrant dwarfs in the knowledge to which they pretended as
+you and I and all the sons of Adam.  The former, however, deserved some
+excuse; the latter none.  The former made a very ill use of their reason,
+no doubt, when they presume to dogmatise about the divine nature, but
+they deceived nobody.  What they taught, they taught on their own
+authority, which every other man was at liberty to receive or reject as
+he approved or disapproved the doctrine.  Christians, on the other hand,
+made a very ill use of revelation and reason both.  Instead of employing
+the superior principle to direct and confine the inferior, they employed
+it to sanctify all that wild imagination, the passions, and the interests
+of the ecclesiastical order suggested.  This abuse of revelation was so
+scandalous that whilst they were building up a system of religion under
+the name of Christianity, every one who sought to signalise himself in
+the enterprise—and they were multitudes—dragged the Scriptures to his
+opinion by different interpretations, paraphrases, comments.  Arius and
+Nestorius both pretended that they had it on their sides; Athanasius and
+Cyril on theirs.  They rendered the Word of God so dubious that it ceased
+to be a criterion, and they had recourse to another—to Councils and the
+decrees of Councils.  He must be very ignorant in ecclesiastical
+antiquity who does not know by what intrigues of the contending
+factions—for such they were, and of the worst kind—these decrees were
+obtained; and yet, an opinion prevailing that the Holy Ghost, the same
+Divine Spirit who dictated the Scriptures, presided in these assemblies
+and dictated their decrees, their decrees passed for infallible
+decisions, and sanctified, little by little, much of the superstition,
+the nonsense, and even the blasphemy which the Fathers taught, and all
+the usurpations of the Church.  This opinion prevailed and influenced the
+minds of men so powerfully and so long that Erasmus, who owns in one of
+his letters that the writings of Œcolampadius against transubstantiation
+seemed sufficient to seduce even the elect (“ut seduci posse videantur
+etiam electi”), declares in another that nothing hindered him from
+embracing the doctrine of Œcolampadius but the consent of the Church to
+the other doctrine (“nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ”).  Thus artificial
+theology rose on the demolitions, not on the foundations, of
+Christianity; was incorporated into it; and became a principal part of
+it.  How much it becomes a good Christian to distinguish them, in his
+private thoughts at least, and how unfit even the greatest, the most
+moderate, and the least ambitious of the ecclesiastical order are to
+assist us in making this distinction, I have endeavoured to show you by
+reason and by example.
+
+It remains, then, that we apply ourselves to the study of the first
+philosophy without any other guides than the works and the Word of God.
+In natural religion the clergy are unnecessary; in revealed they are
+dangerous guides.
+
+
+
+
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