Godolphin, uneasy, but wary, reserved and selfpossessed, prepared himself to stand on the defensive.  But Shrewsbury, who of all the four was the least to blame, was utterly overwhelmed.  He wrote in extreme distress to William, acknowledged with warm expressions of gratitude the King’s rare generosity, and protested that Fenwick had malignantly exaggerated and distorted mere trifles into enormous crimes.  “My Lord Middleton,”—­such was the substance of the letter,—­“was certainly in communication with me about the time of the battle of La Hogue.  We are relations; we frequently met; we supped together just before he returned to France; I promised to take care of his interests here; he in return offered to do me good offices there; but I told him that I had offended too deeply to be forgiven, and that I would not stoop to ask forgiveness.”  This, Shrewsbury averred, was the whole extent of his offence.731 It is but too fully proved that this confession was by no means ingenuous; nor is it likely that William was deceived.  But he was determined to spare the repentant traitor the humiliation of owning a fault and accepting a pardon.  “I can see,” the King wrote, “no crime at all in what you have acknowledged.  Be assured that these calumnies have made no unfavourable impression on me.  Nay, you shall find that they have strengthened my confidence in you."732 A man hardened in depravity would have been perfectly contented with an acquittal so complete, announced in language so gracious.  But Shrewsbury was quite unnerved by a tenderness which he was conscious that he had not merited.  He shrank from the thought of meeting the master whom he had wronged, and by whom he had been forgiven, and of sustaining the gaze of the peers, among whom his birth and his abilities had gained for him a station of which he felt that he was unworthy.  The campaign in the Netherlands was over.  The session of Parliament was approaching.  The King was expected with the first fair wind.  Shrewsbury left town and retired to the Wolds of Gloucestershire.  In that district, then one of the wildest in the south of the island, he had a small country seat, surrounded by pleasant gardens and fish-ponds.  William had, in his progress a year before, visited this dwelling, which lay far from the nearest high road and from the nearest market town, and had been much struck by the silence and loneliness of the retreat in which he found the most graceful and splendid of English courtiers.

At one in the morning of the sixth of October, the King landed at Margate.  Late in the evening he reached Kensington.  The following morning a brilliant crowd of ministers and nobles pressed to kiss his hand; but he missed one face which ought to have been there, and asked where the Duke of Shrewsbury was, and when he was expected in town.  The next day came a letter from the Duke, averring that he had just had a bad fall in hunting.  His side had been bruised; his lungs had suffered; he had spit blood,