Upon the arrival of Colonel Disney[14] at court, with an account that Mr. Hill had taken possession of Dunkirk, an universal joy spread over the kingdom, this event being looked on as the certain forerunner of a peace:  besides, the French faith was in so ill a reputation among us, that many persons, otherwise sanguine enough, could never bring themselves to believe, that the town would be delivered, till certain intelligence came that it was actually in our hands.  Neither were the ministers themselves altogether at ease, or free from suspicion, whatever countenance they made; for they knew very well, that the French King had many plausible reasons to elude his promise, if he found cause to repent it.  One condition of surrendering Dunkirk, being a general armistice of all the troops in the British pay, which Her Majesty was not able to perform; and upon this failure, the Marechal de Villars (as we have before related) endeavoured to dissuade his court from accepting the conditions:  and in the very interval, while those difficulties were adjusting, the Marechal d’Uxelles, one of the French plenipotentiaries at Utrecht (whose inclinations, as well as those of his colleague Mons. Mesnager, led him to favour the States more than Britain) assured the lord privy seal, that the Dutch were then pressing to enter into separate measures with his master:  and his lordship, in a visit to the Abbe de Polignac, observing a person to withdraw as he entered the abbe’s chamber, was told by this minister, that the person he saw was one Molo, of Amsterdam, mentioned before, a famous agent for the States with France, who had been entertaining him (the abbe) upon the same subject, but that he had refused to treat with Molo, without the privity of England.

[Footnote 14:  Colonel Disney or Desnee, called “Duke” Disney, was one of the members of the Brothers Club, a boon companion of Bolingbroke, and, as Swift says, “not an old man, but an old rake.”  From various sources we gather that he was a high liver, and not very nice in his ways of high living.  In spite, however, of his undoubted profligacy, he must have been a man of good nature and a kindly heart, since he received affectionate record from Gay, Pope, and Swift.  Mr. Walter Sichel quotes from “an unfinished sketch of a larger poem,” by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in which Disney’s worst characteristics are held up to ridicule. ("Bolingbroke and his Times,” pp. 288-290).  Swift often refers to him in his “Journal.” [T.S.]]

Mr. Harley, whom we mentioned above to have been sent early in the spring to Utrecht, continued longer in Holland than was at first expected; but having received Her Majesty’s farther instructions, was about this time arrived at Hanover.  It was the misfortune of his Electoral Highness, to be very ill served by Mons. Bothmar, his envoy here, who assisted at all the factious meetings of the discontented party, and deceived his master by a false representation of