known wishes, and with a haste and a secresy which plainly showed that the King did not wish to be annoyed by their remonstrances.  The Lord Chamberlain pretended that he had done all in his power to serve Wharton.  But the Whig chiefs were not men to be duped by the professions of so notorious a liar.  Montague bitterly described him as a fireship, dangerous at best, but on the whole most dangerous as a consort, and least dangerous when showing hostile colours.  Smith, who was the most efficient of Montague’s lieutenants, both in the Treasury and in the Parliament, cordially sympathised with his leader.  Sunderland was therefore left undefended.  His enemies became bolder and more vehement every day.  Sir Thomas Dyke, member for Grinstead, and Lord Norris, son of the Earl of Abingdon, talked of moving an address requesting the King to banish for ever from the Court and the Council that evil adviser who had misled His Majesty’s royal uncles, had betrayed the liberties of the people, and had abjured the Protestant religion.

Sunderland had been uneasy from the first moment at which his name had been mentioned in the House of Commons.  He was now in an agony of terror.  The whole enigma of his life, an enigma of which many unsatisfactory and some absurd explanations have been propounded, is at once solved if we consider him as a man insatiably greedy of wealth and power, and yet nervously apprehensive of danger.  He rushed with ravenous eagerness at every bait which was offered to his cupidity.  But any ominous shadow, any threatening murmur, sufficed to stop him in his full career, and to make him change his course or bury himself in a hiding place.  He ought to have thought himself fortunate indeed, when, after all the crimes which he had committed, he found himself again enjoying his picture gallery and his woods at Althorpe, sitting in the House of Lords, admitted to the royal closet, pensioned from the Privy Purse, consulted about the most important affairs of state.  But his ambition and avarice would not suffer him to rest till he held a high and lucrative office, till he was a regent of the kingdom.  The consequence was, as might have been expected, a violent clamour; and that clamour he had not the spirit to face.

His friends assured him that the threatened address would not be carried.  Perhaps a hundred and sixty members might vote for it; but hardly more.  “A hundred and sixty!” he cried:  “No minister can stand against a hundred and sixty.  I am sure that I will not try.”  It must be remembered that a hundred and sixty votes in a House of five hundred and thirteen members would correspond to more than two hundred votes in the present House of Commons; a very formidable minority on the unfavourable side of a question deeply affecting the personal character of a public man.  William, unwilling to part with a servant whom he knew to be unprincipled, but whom he did not consider as more unprincipled than many other English politicians, and in whom he had found