His founder’s merits were, by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on his country.  Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom,—­in which his Majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil.

His founder’s merit was the merit of a gentleman raised by the arts of a court and the protection of a Wolsey to the eminence of a great and potent lord.  His merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to injustice, to provoke a people to rebellion.  My merit was, to awaken the sober part of the country, that they might put themselves on their guard against any one potent lord, or any greater number of potent lords, or any combination of great leading men of any sort, if ever they should attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the reverse order,—­that is, by instigating a corrupted populace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace’s ancestor supported, and of which he profited in the manner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth.

The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace’s house was that of being concerned as a counsellor of state in advising, and in his person executing, the conditions of a dishonorable peace with France,—­the surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our outguard on the Continent.  By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle in the mouth of that power, was not many years afterwards finally lost.  My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it could assume,—­the worst, indeed, which the prime cause and principle of all evil could possibly give it.  It was my endeavor by every means to excite a spirit in the House, where I had the honor of a seat, for carrying on with early vigor and decision the most clearly just and necessary war that this or any nation ever carried on, in order to save my country from the iron yoke of its power, and from the more dreadful contagion of its principles,—­to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of its most intense malignity.