a genius for politics not inferior to that of Richelieu, of a genius for war not inferior to that of Turenne.  Perhaps the disgraced General, in obscurity and inaction, anticipated the day when his power to help and hurt in Europe would be equal to that of her mightiest princes, when he would be servilely flattered and courted by Caesar on one side and by Lewis the Great on the other, and when every year would add another hundred thousand pounds to the largest fortune that had ever been accumulated by any English subject.  All this might be if Mrs. Morley were Queen.  But that Mr. Freeman should ever see Mrs. Morley Queen had till lately been not very probable.  Mary’s life was a much better life than his, and quite as good a life as her sister’s.  That William would have issue seemed unlikely.  But it was generally expected that he would soon die.  His widow might marry again, and might leave children who would succeed her.  In these circumstances Marlborough might well think that he had very little interest in maintaining that settlement of the Crown which had been made by the Convention.  Nothing was so likely to serve his purpose as confusion, civil war, another revolution, another abdication, another vacancy of the throne.  Perhaps the nation, incensed against William, yet not reconciled to James, and distracted between hatred of foreigners and hatred of Jesuits, might prefer both to the Dutch King and to the Popish King one who was at once a native of our country and a member of our Church.  That this was the real explanation of Marlborough’s dark and complicated plots was, as we have seen, firmly believed by some of the most zealous Jacobites, and is in the highest degree probable.  It is certain that during several years he had spared no efforts to inflame the army and the nation against the government.  But all was now changed.  Mary was gone.  By the Bill of Rights the Crown was entailed on Anne after the death of William.  The death of William could not be far distant.  Indeed all the physicians who attended him wondered that he was still alive; and, when the risks of war were added to the risks of disease, the probability seemed to be that in a few months he would be in his grave.  Marlborough saw that it would now be madness to throw every thing into disorder and to put every thing to hazard.  He had done his best to shake the throne while it seemed unlikely that Anne would ever mount it except by violent means.  But he did his best to fix it firmly, as soon as it became highly probably that she would soon be called to fill it in the regular course of nature and of law.

The Princess was easily induced by the Churchills to write to the King a submissive and affectionate letter of condolence.  The King, who was never much inclined to engage in a commerce of insincere compliments, and who was still in the first agonies of his grief, showed little disposition to meet her advances.  But Somers, who felt that every thing was at stake, went to Kensington, and made his way into the royal closet.