Bulkeley, however, was not to be so repulsed.  He came again, and introduced the subject which was nearest his heart.  Godolphin then asked after his old master and mistress in the mournful tone of a man who despaired of ever being reconciled to them.  Bulkeley assured him that King James was ready to forgive all the past.  “May I tell His Majesty that you will try to deserve his favour?” At this Godolphin rose, said something about the trammels of office and his wish to be released from them, and put an end to the interview.

Bulkeley soon made a third attempt.  By this time Godolphin had learned some things which shook his confidence in the stability of the government which he served.  He began to think, as he would himself have expressed it, that he had betted too deep on the Revolution, and that it was time to hedge.  Evasions would no longer serve his turn.  It was necessary to speak out.  He spoke out, and declared himself a devoted servant of King James.  “I shall take an early opportunity of resigning my place.  But, till then, I am under a tie.  I must not betray my trust.”  To enhance the value of the sacrifice which he proposed to make, he produced a most friendly and confidential letter which he had lately received from William.  “You see how entirely the Prince of Orange trusts me.  He tells me that he cannot do without me, and that there is no Englishman for whom he has so great a kindness; but all this weighs nothing with me in comparison of my duty to my lawful King.”

If the First Lord of the Treasury really had scruples about betraying his trust, those scruples were soon so effectually removed that he very complacently continued, during six years, to eat the bread of one master, while secretly sending professions of attachment and promises of service to another.

The truth is that Godolphin was under the influence of a mind far more powerful and far more depraved than his own.  His perplexities had been imparted to Marlborough, to whom he had long been bound by such friendship as two very unprincipled men are capable of feeling for each other, and to whom he was afterwards bound by close domestic ties.

Marlborough was in a very different situation from that of William’s other servants.  Lloyd might make overtures to Russell, and Bulkeley to Godolphin.  But all the agents of the banished Court stood aloof from the traitor of Salisbury.  That shameful night seemed to have for ever separated the perjured deserter from the Prince whom he had ruined.  James had, even in the last extremity, when his army was in full retreat, when his whole kingdom had risen against him, declared that he would never pardon Churchill, never, never.  By all the Jacobites the name of Churchill was held in peculiar abhorrence; and, in the prose and verse which came forth daily from their secret presses, a precedence in infamy, among all the many traitors of the age, was assigned to him.  In the order of things which had sprung from the Revolution,