in his hand, to the Queen’s withdrawing her favour from him and to his friends abandoning him—­pretences utterly groundless when he first made them, and which he brought to be real at last.  Even the winter before the Queen’s death, when his credit began to wane apace, he might have regained it; he might have reconciled himself perfectly with all his ancient friends, and have acquired the confidence of the whole party.  I say he might have done all this, because I am persuaded that none of those I have named were so convinced of his perfidy, so jaded with his yoke, or so much piqued personally against him as I was; and yet if he would have exerted himself in concert with us to improve the few advantages which were left us and to ward off the visible danger which threatened our persons and our party, I would have stifled my private animosity and would have acted under him with as much zeal as ever.  But he was incapable of taking such a turn.  The sum of all his policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them.  When it became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the end of his line.

By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.

The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution in the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded, and by the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of a new administration.  Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect to them and to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be brought about before he could effectually serve either.  You cannot have forgot how things which we pressed were put off upon every occasion till the peace; the peace was to be the date of a new administration, and the period at which the millenary year of Toryism should begin.  Thus were the Tories at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as soon as the peace had rendered them practicable.  He was to attempt nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.

After many delays, fatal to the general interest of Europe, this peace was signed:  and the only considerable thing which he brought about afterwards was the marriage I have mentioned above; and by it an accession of riches and honour to a family whose estate was very mean, and whose illustration before this time I never met with anywhere, but in the vain discourses which he used to hold over claret.  If he kept his word with any of the parties above-mentioned, it must be supposed that he did so with the Whigs;