If his Majesty did not, till some short time after this, declare the intended invasion to Parliament it was not for want of information.  Before I came to Paris, what was doing had been discovered.  The little armament made at the Havre, which furnished the only means the Chevalier then had for his transportation into Britain, which had exhausted the treasury of St. Germains, and which contained all the arms and ammunition that could be depended upon for the whole undertaking, though they were hardly sufficient to begin the work even in Scotland, was talked of publicly.  A Minister less alert and less capable than the Earl of Stair would easily have been at the bottom of the secret, for so it was called, when the particulars of messages received and sent, the names of the persons from whom they came, and by whom they were carried, were whispered about at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.

In short, what by the indiscretion of people here, what by the rebound which came often back from London, what by the private interests and ambitious views of persons in the French Court, and what by other causes unnecessary to be examined now, the most private transactions came to light:  and they who imagined that they trusted their heads to the keeping of one or two friends, were in reality at the mercy of numbers.  Into such company was I fallen for my sins; and it is upon the credit of such a mob Ministry that the Tories have judged me capable of betraying a trust, or incapable of discharging it.

I had made very little progress in the business which brought me to Paris, when the paper so long expected was sent, in pursuance of former instances, from England.  The unanimous sense of the principal persons engaged was contained in it.  The whole had been dictated word for word to the gentleman who brought it over, by the Earl of Mar, and it had been delivered to him by the Duke of Ormond.  I was driving in the wide ocean without a compass when this dropped unexpectedly into my hands.  I received it joyfully, and I steered my course exactly by it.  Whether the persons from whom it came pursued the principles and observed the rules which they laid down as the measures of their own conduct and of ours, will appear by the sequel of this relation.

This memorial asserted that there were no hopes of succeeding in a present undertaking, for many reasons deduced in it, without an immediate and universal rising of the people in all parts of England upon the Chevalier’s arrival; and that this insurrection was in no degree probable unless he brought a body of regular troops along with him:  that if this attempt miscarried, his cause and his friends, the English liberty and Government, would be utterly ruined:  but if by coming without troops he resolved to risk these and everything else, he must set out so as not to arrive before the end of September, to justify which opinion many arguments were urged.  In this case twenty thousand arms, a train of artillery,