attributed to Montague were excellent, but denied that those plans were Montague’s.  The voice of detraction, however, was for a time drowned by the loud applauses of the Parliament and the City.  The authority which the Chancellor of the Exchequer exercised in the House of Commons was unprecedented and unrivalled.  In the Cabinet his influence was daily increasing.  He had no longer a superior at the Board of Treasury.  In consequence of Fenwick’s confession, the last Tory who held a great and efficient office in the State had been removed, and there was at length a purely Whig Ministry.

It had been impossible to prevent reports about that confession from getting abroad.  The prisoner, indeed, had found means of communicating with his friends, and had doubtless given them to understand that he had said nothing against them, and much against the creatures of the usurper.  William wished the matter to be left to the ordinary tribunals, and was most unwilling that it should be debated elsewhere.  But his counsellors, better acquainted than himself with the temper of large and divided assemblies, were of opinion that a parliamentary discussion, though perhaps undesirable, was inevitable.  It was in the power of a single member of either House to force on such a discussion; and in both Houses there were members who, some from a sense of duty, some from mere love of mischief, were determined to know whether the prisoner had, as it was rumoured, brought grave charges against some of the most distinguished men in the kingdom.  If there must be an inquiry, it was surely desirable that the accused statesmen should be the first to demand it.  There was, however, one great difficulty.  The Whigs, who formed the majority of the Lower House, were ready to vote, as one man, for the entire absolution of Russell and Shrewsbury, and had no wish to put a stigma on Marlborough, who was not in place, and therefore excited little jealousy.  But a strong body of honest gentlemen, as Wharton called them, could not, by any management, be induced to join in a resolution acquitting Godolphin.  To them Godolphin was an eyesore.  All the other Tories who, in the earlier years of William’s reign, had borne a chief part in the direction of affairs, had, one by one, been dismissed.  Nottingham, Trevor, Leeds, were no longer in power.  Pembroke could hardly be called a Tory, and had never been really in power.  But Godolphin still retained his post at Whitehall; and to the men of the Revolution it seemed intolerable that one who had sate at the Council Board of Charles and James, and who had voted for a Regency, should be the principal minister of finance.  Those who felt thus had learned with malicious delight that the First Lord of the Treasury was named in the confession about which all the world was talking; and they were determined not to let slip so good an opportunity of ejecting him from office.  On the other hand, every body who had seen Fenwick’s paper, and