I say nothing of the ships which the Jacobites pretend that they sent into Scotland three weeks or a month after the Pretender was returned.  I believe they might have had my Lord Stair’s connivance then, as well as the Regent’s.  I say nothing of the order which they pretend to have obtained, and which I never saw, for the stores that were seized at Havre to be delivered to Castel Blanco.  I have already said enough on this head, and you cannot have failed to observe that this signal favour was never obtained by these people till the Marshal d’Huxelles had owned to me that nothing was to be expected from France, and that the only thing which I could do was to endeavour to bring the Pretender, the Earl of Mar, and the principal persons who were most exposed, off, neither he nor I imagining that any such would be left behind.

When I began to appear in the world, upon the advertisements which my friends gave me of the clamour that was raised against me, you will easily think I did not enter into so many particulars as I have done with you.  I said even less than you have seen in those letters which Brinsden wrote into England in March and April was twelvemonth, and yet the clamour sank immediately.  The people of consideration at this Court beat it down, and the Court of St. Germains grew so ashamed of it that the Queen thought fit to purge herself of having had any share in encouraging the discourses which were held against me, or having been so much as let into the secret of the measure which preceded them.  The provocation was great, but I resolved to act without passion.  I saw the advantage the Pretender and his council, who disposed of things better for me than I should have done for myself, had given me; but I saw likewise that I must improve this advantage with the utmost caution.

As I never imagined that he would treat me in the manner he did, nor that his Ministers could be weak enough to advise him to it, I had resolved, on his return from Scotland, to follow him till his residence should be fixed somewhere or other.  After which, having served the Tories in this which I looked upon as their last struggle for power, and having continued to act in the Pretender’s affairs till the end of the term for which I embarked with him, I should have esteemed myself to be at liberty, and should in the civillest manner I was able have taken my leave of him.  Had we parted thus, I should have remained in a very strange situation during the rest of my life; but I had examined myself thoroughly, I was determined, I was prepared.

On one side he would have thought that he had a sort of right on any future occasion to call me out of my retreat; the Tories would probably have thought the same thing:  my resolution was taken to refuse them both, and I foresaw that both would condemn me.  On the other side, the consideration of his keeping measures with me, joined to that of having once openly declared for him, would have created a point of honour