He hastened into the country, and hid himself there, during some months, from the public eye.  When the Parliament met again, however, he emerged from his retreat.  Though he was well stricken in years and cruelly tortured by disease, his ambition was still as ardent as ever.  With indefatigable energy he began a third time to climb, as he flattered himself, towards that dizzy pinnacle which he had twice reached, and from which he had twice fallen.  He took a prominent part in debate; but, though his eloquence and knowledge always secured to him the attention of his hearers, he was never again, even when the Tory party was in power, admitted to the smallest share in the direction of affairs.

There was one great humiliation which he could not be spared.  William was about to take the command of the army in the Netherlands; and it was necessary that, before he sailed, he should determine by whom the government should be administered during his absence.  Hitherto Mary had acted as his vicegerent when he was out of England; but she was gone.  He therefore delegated his authority to seven Lords Justices, Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal, Pembroke, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Devonshire, Lord Steward, Dorset, Lord Chamberlain, Shrewsbury, Secretary of State, and Godolphin, First Commissioner of the Treasury.  It is easy to judge from this list of names which way the balance of power was now leaning.  Godolphin alone of the seven was a Tory.  The Lord President, still second in rank, and a few days before first in power, of the great lay dignitaries of the realm, was passed over; and the omission was universally regarded as an official announcement of his disgrace.586

There were some who wondered that the Princess of Denmark was not appointed Regent.  The reconciliation, which had been begun while Mary was dying, had since her death been, in external show at least, completed.  This was one of those occasions on which Sunderland was peculiarly qualified to be useful.  He was admirably fitted to manage a personal negotiation, to soften resentment, to soothe wounded pride, to select, among all the objects of human desire, the very bait which was most likely to allure the mind with which he was dealing.  On this occasion his task was not difficult.  He had two excellent assistants, Marlborough in the household of Anne, and Somers in the cabinet of William.

Marlborough was now as desirous to support the government as he had once been to subvert it.  The death of Mary had produced a complete change in all his schemes.  There was one event to which he looked forward with the most intense longing, the accession of the Princess to the English throne.  It was certain that, on the day on which she began to reign, he would be in her Court all that Buckingham had been in the Court of James the First.  Marlborough too must have been conscious of powers of a very different order from those which Buckingham had possessed, of