CHAPTER IV.

Recapitulations.

From such fitful lights as could be cast upon his dark history by the broken narrative of his poor patron, torn by remorse and struggling in the last pangs of dissolution, Mr. Esmond had been made to understand so far, that his mother was long since dead; and so there could be no question as regarded her or her honor, tarnished by her husband’s desertion and injury, to influence her son in any steps which he might take either for prosecuting or relinquishing his own just claims.  It appeared from my poor lord’s hurried confession, that he had been made acquainted with the real facts of the case only two years since, when Mr. Holt visited him, and would have implicated him in one of those many conspiracies by which the secret leaders of King James’s party in this country were ever endeavoring to destroy the Prince of Orange’s life or power:  conspiracies so like murder, so cowardly in the means used, so wicked in the end, that our nation has sure done well in throwing off all allegiance and fidelity to the unhappy family that could not vindicate its right except by such treachery—­by such dark intrigue and base agents.  There were designs against King William that were no more honorable than the ambushes of cut-throats and footpads.  ’Tis humiliating to think that a great Prince, possessor of a great and sacred right, and upholder of a great cause, should have stooped to such baseness of assassination and treasons as are proved by the unfortunate King James’s own warrant and sign manual given to his supporters in this country.  What he and they called levying war was, in truth, no better than instigating murder.  The noble Prince of Orange burst magnanimously through those feeble meshes of conspiracy in which his enemies tried to envelop him:  it seemed as if their cowardly daggers broke upon the breast of his undaunted resolution.  After King James’s death, the Queen and her people at St. Germains—­priests and women for the most part—­continued their intrigues in behalf of the young Prince, James the Third, as he was called in France and by his party here (this Prince, or Chevalier de St. George, was born in the same year with Esmond’s young pupil Frank, my Lord Viscount’s son); and the Prince’s affairs, being in the hands of priests and women, were conducted as priests and women will conduct them, artfully, cruelly, feebly, and to a certain bad issue.  The moral of the Jesuits’ story I think as wholesome a one as ever was writ:  the artfullest, the wisest, the most toilsome, and dexterous plot-builders in the world—­there always comes a day when the roused public indignation kicks their flimsy edifice down, and sends its cowardly enemies a-flying.  Mr. Swift hath finely described that passion for intrigue, that love of secrecy, slander, and lying, which belongs to weak people, hangers-on of weak courts.  ’Tis the nature of such to hate and envy the strong, and