The Earl of Stair, as well as Mr. Craggs, who arrived soon after in France, came into my sense.  I have reason to believe that the King has approved it likewise upon their representations, since he has been pleased to give me the most gracious assurances of his favour.  What the effect of all this may be in the next or in any other Session, I know not; but this is the foot on which I have put myself, and on which I stand at the moment I write to you.  The Whigs may continue inveterate, and by consequence frustrate his Majesty’s good intentions towards me; the Tories may continue to rail at me, on the credit of such enemies as I have described to you in the course of this relation:  neither the one nor the other shall make me swerve out of the path which I have traced to myself.

I have now led you through the several stages which I proposed at first; and I should do wrong to your good understanding, as well as to our mutual friendship, if I suspected that you could hold any other language to me than that which Dolabella uses to Cicero:  “Satisfactum est jam a te vel officio vel familiaritati; satisfactum etiam partibus.”  The King, who pardons me, might complain of me; the Whigs might declaim against me; my family might reproach me for the little regard which I have shown to my own and to their interests; but where is the crime I have been guilty of towards my party and towards my friends?  In what part of my conduct will the Tories find an excuse for the treatment which they have given me?  As Tories such as they were when I left England, I defy them to find any.  But here lies the sore, and, tender as it is, I must lay it open.  Those amongst them who rail at me now are changed from what they were, or from what they professed themselves to be, when we lived and acted together.  They were Tories then; they are Jacobites now.  Their objections to the course of my conduct whilst I was in the Pretender’s interest are the pretence; the true reason of their anger is, that I renounce the Pretender for my life.  When you were first driven into this interest, I may appeal to you for the notion which the party had.  You thought of restoring him by the strength of the Tories, and of opposing a Tory king to a Whig king.  You took him up as the instrument of your revenge and of your ambition.  You looked on him as your creature, and never once doubted of making what terms you pleased with him.  This is so true that the same language is still held to the catechumens in Jacobitism.  Were the contrary to be avowed even now, the party in England would soon diminish.  I engaged on this principle when your orders sent me to Commercy, and I never acted on any other.  This ought to have been part of my merit towards the Tories; and it would have been so if they had continued in the same dispositions.  But they are changed, and this very thing is become my crime.  Instead of making the Pretender their tool, they are his.  Instead of having in view to restore