Such was Fenwick’s confession.  Devonshire received it and sent it by express to the Netherlands, without intimating to any of his fellow councillors what it contained.  The accused ministers afterwards complained bitterly of this proceeding.  Devonshire defended himself by saying that he had been specially deputed by the King to take the prisoner’s information, and was bound, as a true servant of the Crown, to transmit that information to His Majesty and to His Majesty alone.

The messenger sent by Devonshire found William at Loo.  The King read the confession, and saw at once with what objects it had been drawn up.  It contained little more than what he had long known, and had long, with politic and generous dissimulation, affected not to know.  If he spared, employed and promoted men who had been false to him, it was not because he was their dupe.  His observation was quick and just; his intelligence was good; and he had, during some years, had in his hands proofs of much that Fenwick had only gathered from wandering reports.  It has seemed strange to many that a Prince of high spirit and acrimonious temper should have treated servants, who had so deeply wronged him, with a kindness hardly to be expected from the meekest of human beings.  But William was emphatically a statesman.  Ill humour, the natural and pardonable effect of much bodily and much mental suffering, might sometimes impel him to give a tart answer.  But never did he on any important occasion indulge his angry passions at the expense of the great interests of which he was the guardian.  For the sake of those interests, proud and imperious as he was by nature, he submitted patiently to galling restraints, bore cruel indignities and disappointments with the outward show of serenity, and not only forgave, but often pretended not to see, offences which might well have moved him to bitter resentment.  He knew that he must work with such tools as he had.  If he was to govern England he must employ the public men of England; and in his age, the public men of England, with much of a peculiar kind of ability, were, as a class, lowminded and immoral.  There were doubtless exceptions.  Such was Nottingham among the Tories, and Somers among the Whigs.  But the majority, both of the Tory and of the Whig ministers of William, were men whose characters had taken the ply in the days of the Antipuritan reaction.  They had been formed in two evil schools, in the most unprincipled of courts, and the most unprincipled of oppositions, a court which took its character from Charles, an opposition headed by Shaftesbury.  From men so trained it would have been unreasonable to expect disinterested and stedfast fidelity to any cause.  But though they could not be trusted, they might be used and they might be useful.  No reliance could be placed on their principles but much reliance might be placed on their hopes and on their fears; and of the two Kings who laid claim to the English crown, the King from whom there was most to hope and