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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope
+by Lord Bolingbroke
+(#1 in our series by Lord Bolingbroke)
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+Title: Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope
+
+Author: Lord Bolingbroke
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5132]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 7, 2002]
+[Most recently updated: May 7, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LETTERS BY BOLINGBROKE ***
+
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+
+This eBook was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.
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+
+
+LETTERS TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM AND MR. POPE
+BY LORD BOLINGBROKE
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+   Introduction By Henry Morley
+   Letter To Sir William Windham
+   Letter To Alexander Pope
+
+
+
+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 AEtolian, who brought Antiochus into
+Greece:  "quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias
+ejus, erexerat multorum in Graecia 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 a l'ancien systeme" 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 Abbe 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 Abbe
+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
+Compiegne.  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 Abbe 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'epee;" 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 foenum 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, adhaerescunt;" 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 naturae
+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, be 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 a 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 proecognitis et
+proeconcessis.
+
+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, a
+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 a 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.")  Scaevola 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 naturae 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 Scaevola--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
+praedestinationis doctrinam invidia gravat," says Calvin, "aperte
+maledicit Deo."  Let us say, "Quisquis praedestinationis 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 Irenaeus, 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 "scientiae 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
+OEcolampadius 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
+OEcolampadius but the consent of the Church to the other doctrine
+("nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiae").  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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