As soon as I received advice that the Chevalier was sailed from Dunkirk, I renewed, I redoubled all my applications.  I neglected no means, I forgot no argument which my understanding could suggest to me.  What the Duke of Ormond rested upon, you have seen already.  And I doubt very much whether Lord Mar, if he had been here in my place, would have been able to employ measures more effectual than those which I made use of.  I may, without any imputation of arrogance, compare myself on this occasion with his lordship, since there was nothing in the management of this affair above my degree of capacity; nothing equal, either in extent or difficulty, to the business which he was a spectator of, and which I carried on when we were Secretaries of State together under the late Queen.

The King of France, who was not able to furnish the Pretender with money himself, had written some time before his death to his grandson, and had obtained a promise of four hundred thousand crowns from the King of Spain.  A small part of this sum had been received by the Queen’s Treasurer at St. Germains, and had been either sent to Scotland or employed to defray the expenses which were daily making on the coast.  I pressed the Spanish Ambassador at Paris; I solicited, by Lawless, Alberoni at Madrid, and I found another more private and more promising way of applying to him.  I took care to have a number of officers picked out of the Irish troops which serve in that country; their routes were given them, and I sent a ship to receive and transport them.  The money came in so slowly and in such trifling sums that it turned to little account, and the officers were on their way when the Chevalier returned from Scotland.

In the summer endeavours had been used to prevail on the King of Sweden to transport from Gottenburg the troops he had in that neighbourhood into Scotland or into the North of England.  He had excused himself, not because he disliked the proposition, which, on the contrary, he thought agreeable to his interest, but for reasons of another kind.  First, because the troops at hand for this service consisted in horse, not in foot, which had been asked, and which were alone proper for such an expedition.  Secondly, because a declaration of this sort might turn the Protestant princes of the Empire, from whose offices he had still some prospect of assistance, against him.  And thirdly, because although he knew that the King of Great Britain was his enemy, yet they were not in war together, nor had the latter acted yet awhile openly enough against him to justify such a rupture.  At the time I am speaking of, these reasons were removed by the King of Sweden’s being beat out of the Empire by the little consequence which his management of the Protestant princes was to him, and by the declaration of war which the King, as Elector of Hanover, made.  I took up this negotiation therefore again.  The Regent appeared to come into it.  He spoke fair to the Baron de