Chapter II: Part 2

In this state of confusion and distress, to which he had reduced himself and us, you remember the part he acted. He was the spy of the Whigs, and voted with us in the morning against those very questions which he had penned the night before with Walpole and others. He kept his post on terms which no man but he would have held it on, neither submitting to the Queen, nor complying with his friends. He would not, or he could not, act with us; and he resolved that we should not act without him as long as he could hinder it. The Queen’s health was very precarious, and at her death he hoped by these means to deliver us up, bound as it were hand and foot, to our adversaries. On the foundation of this merit he flattered himself that he had gained some of the Whigs, and softened at least the rest of the party to him. By his secret negotiations at Hanover, he took it for granted that he was not only reconciled to that Court, but that he should, under his present Majesty’s reign, have as much credit as he had enjoyed under that of the Queen. He was weak enough to boast of this, and to promise his good offices voluntarily to several: for no man was weak enough to think them worth being solicited. In a word, you must have heard that he answered to Lord Dartmouth and to Mr. Bromley, that one should keep the Privy Seal, and the other the seals of Secretary; and that Lord Cowper makes no scruple of telling how he came to offer him the seals of Chancellor. When the King arrived, he went to Greenwich with an affectation of pomp and of favour. Against his suspicious character, he was once in his life the bubble of his credulity; and this delusion betrayed him into a punishment more severe in my sense than all which has happened to him since, or than perpetual exile; he was affronted in the manner in which he was presented to the King. The meanest subject would have been received with goodness, the most obnoxious with an air of indifference; but he was received with the most distinguishing contempt. This treatment he had in the face of the nation. The King began his reign, in this instance, with punishing the ingratitude, the perfidy, the insolence, which had been shown to his predecessor. Oxford fled from Court covered with shame, the object of the derision of the Whigs and of the indignation of the Tories.

The Queen might, if she had pleased, have saved herself from all those mortifications she met with during the last months of her reign, and her servants and the Tory party from those misfortunes which they endured during the same time; perhaps from those which they have fallen into since her death. When she found that the peace, from the conclusion of which she expected ease and quiet, brought still greater trouble upon her; when she saw the weakness of her Government, and the confusion of her affairs increase every day; when she saw her First Minister bewildered and unable to extricate himself or her; in fine, when the negligence of his public conduct, and the sauciness of his private behaviour had rendered him insupportable to her, and she took the resolution of laying him aside, there was a strength still remaining sufficient to have supported her Government, to have fulfilled in great part the expectations of the Tories, and to have constituted both them and the Ministers in such a situation as would have left them little to apprehend. Some designs were, indeed, on foot which might have produced very great disorders: Oxford’s conduct had given much occasion to them, and with the terror of them he endeavoured to intimidate the Queen. But expedients were not hard to be found by which those designs might have been nipped in the bud, or else by which the persons who promoted them might have been induced to lay them aside. But that fatal irresolution inherent to the Stuart race hung upon her. She felt too much inward resentment to be able to conceal his disgrace from him; yet, after he had made this discovery, she continued to trust all her power in his hands.

No people ever were in such a condition as ours continued to be from the autumn of 1713 to the summer following. The Queen’s health sank every day. The attack which she had in the winter at Windsor served as a warning both to those who wished, and to those who feared her death, to expect it. The party which opposed the court had been continually gaining strength by the weakness of our administration: and at this time their numbers were vastly increased, and their spirit was raised by the near prospect of the succession taking place. We were not at liberty to exert the strength we had. We saw our danger, and many of us saw the true means of avoiding it; but whilst the magic wand was in the same hands, this knowledge served only to increase our uneasiness; and, whether we would or no, we were forced with our eyes open to walk on towards the precipice. Every moment we became less able, if the Queen lived, to support her Government; if she died, to secure ourselves. One side was united in a common view, and acted upon a uniform plan: the other had really none at all. We knew that we were out of favour at the Court of Hanover, that we were represented there as Jacobites, and that the Elector, his present Majesty, had been rendered publicly a party to that opposition, in spite of which we made the peace: and yet we neither had taken, nor could take in our present circumstances, any measures to be better or worse there. Thus we languished till the 27th of July, 1714, when the Queen dismissed the Treasurer. On the Friday following, she fell into an apoplexy, and died on Sunday the 1st of August.

You do me, I daresay, the justice to believe that whilst this state of things lasted I saw very well, how little mention soever I might make of it at the time, that no man in the Ministry, or in the party, was so much exposed as myself. I could expect no quarter from the Whigs, for I had deserved none. There were persons amongst them for whom I had great esteem and friendship; yet neither with these, nor with any others, had I preserved a secret correspondence, which might be of use to me in the day of distress: and besides the general character of my party, I knew that particular prejudices were entertained against me at Hanover. The Whigs wanted nothing but an opportunity of attacking the peace, and it could hardly be imagined that they would stop there. In which case I knew that they could have hold on no man so much as myself: the instructions, the orders, the memorials had been drawn by me; the correspondence relating to it in France, and everywhere else, had been carried on by me; in a word, my hand appeared to almost every paper which had been writ in the whole course of the negotiation. To all these considerations I added that of the weight of personal resentment, which I had created against myself at home and abroad: in part unavoidably, by the share I was obliged to take in these affairs; and in part, if you will, unnecessarily, by the warmth of my temper, and by some unguarded expressions, for which I have no excuse to make but that which Tacitus makes for his father-in-law, Julius Agricola: “honestius putabam offendere, quam odisse.”

Having this prospect of being distinguished from the rest of my party, in the common calamity, by severer treatment, I might have justified myself, by reason and by great authorities too, if I had made early provision, at least to be safe when I should be no longer useful. How I could have secured this point I do not think fit to explain: but certain it is that I made no one step towards it. I resolved not to abandon my party by turning Whig, or, which is worse a great deal, whimsical; nor to treat separately from it. I resolved to keep myself at liberty to act on a Tory bottom. If the Queen disgraced Oxford and continued to live afterwards, I knew we should have time and means to provide for our future safety: if the Queen died, and left us in the same unfortunate circumstances, I expected to suffer for and with the Tories; and I was prepared for it.

The thunder had long grumbled in the air; and yet when the bolt fell, most of our party appeared as much surprised as if they had had no reason to expect it. There was a perfect calm and universal submission through the whole kingdom. The Chevalier, indeed, set out as if his design had been to gain the coast and to embark for Great Britain; and the Court of France made a merit to themselves of stopping him and obliging him to return. But this, to my certain knowledge, was a farce acted by concert, to keep up an opinion of his character, when all opinion of his cause seemed to be at an end. He owned this concert to me at Bar, on the occasion of my telling him that he would have found no party ready to receive him, and that the enterprise would have been to the last degree extravagant. He was at this time far from having any encouragement: no party numerous enough to make the least disturbance was formed in his favour. On the King’s arrival the storm arose. The menaces of the Whigs, backed by some very rash declarations, by little circumstances of humour which frequently offend more than real injuries, and by the entire change of all the persons in employment, blew up the coals.

At first many of the Tories had been made to entertain some faint hopes that they would be permitted to live in quiet. I have been assured that the King left Hanover in that resolution. Happy had it been for him and for us if he had continued in it; if the moderation of his temper had not been overborne by the violence of party, and his and the national interest sacrificed to the passions of a few. Others there were among the Tories who had flattered themselves with much greater expectations than these, and who had depended, not on such imaginary favour and dangerous advancement as was offered them afterwards, but on real credit and substantial power under the new government. Such impressions on the minds of men had rendered the two Houses of Parliament, which were then sitting, as good courtiers to King George as ever they had been to Queen Anne. But all these hopes being at once and with violence extinguished, despair succeeded in their room.

Our party began soon to act like men delivered over to their passions, and unguided by any other principle; not like men fired by a just resentment and a reasonable ambition to a bold undertaking. They treated the Government like men who were resolved not to live under it: and yet they took no one measure to support themselves against it. They expressed, without reserve or circumspection, an eagerness to join in any attempt against the Establishment which they had received and confirmed, and which many of them had courted but a few weeks before; and yet in the midst of all this bravery, when the election of the new Parliament came on, some of these very men acted with the coolness of those who are much better disposed to compound than to take arms.

The body of the Tories being in this temper, it is not to be wondered at if they heated one another, and began apace to turn their eyes towards the Pretender; and if those few who had already engaged with him, applied themselves to improve the conjuncture, and endeavoured to list a party for him.

I went, about a month after the Queen’s death, as soon as the Seals were taken from me, into the country; and whilst I continued there, I felt the general disposition to Jacobitism increase daily among people of all ranks; amongst several who had been constantly distinguished by their aversion to that cause. But at my return to London in the month of February or March, 1715, a few weeks before I left England, I began for the first time in my whole life to perceive these general dispositions ripen into resolutions, and to observe some regular workings among many of our principal friends, which denoted a scheme of this kind. These workings, indeed, were very faint; for the persons concerned in carrying them on did not think it safe to speak too plainly to men who were, in truth, ill disposed to the Government because they neither found their account at present under it nor had been managed with art enough to leave them hopes of finding it hereafter, but who at the same time had not the least affection for the Pretender’s person, nor any principle favourable to his interest.

This was the state of things when the new Parliament which his Majesty had called assembled. A great majority of the elections had gone in favour of the Whigs; to which the want of concert among the Tories had contributed as much as the vigour of that party and the influence of the new Government. The Whigs came to the opening of this Parliament full of as much violence as could possess men who expected to make their court, to confirm themselves in power, and to gratify their resentments by the same measures. I have heard that it was a dispute among the Ministers how far this spirit should be indulged; and that the King was determined, or confirmed in a determination, to consent to the prosecutions, and to give the reins to the party, by the representations that were made to him that great difficulties would arise in the conduct of the Session if the Court should appear inclined to check this spirit, and by Mr. W—’s undertaking to carry all the business successfully through the House of Commons if they were at liberty. Such has often been the unhappy fate of our Princes: a real necessity sometimes, and sometimes a seeming one, has forced them to compound with a part of the nation at the expense of the whole; and the success of their business for one year has been purchased at the price of public disorder for many.

The conjuncture I am speaking of affords a memorable instance of this truth. If milder measures had been pursued, certain it is that the Tories had never universally embraced Jacobitism. The violence of the Whigs forced them into the arms of the Pretender. The Court and the party seemed to vie with one another which should go the greatest lengths in severity: and the Ministers, whose true interest it must at all times be to calm the minds of men, and who ought never to set the examples of extraordinary inquiries or extraordinary accusations, were upon this occasion the tribunes of the people.

The Council of Regency which began to sit as soon as the Queen died, acted like a council of the Holy Office. Whoever looked on the face of the nation saw everything quiet; not one of those symptoms appearing which must have shown themselves more or less at that moment if in reality there had been any measures taken during the former reign to defeat the Protestant succession. His Majesty ascended the throne with as little contradiction and as little trouble as ever a son succeeded a father in the possession of a private patrimony. But he who had the opportunity, which I had till my dismission, of seeing a great part of what passed in that Council, would have thought that there had been an opposition actually formed, that the new Establishment was attacked openly from without and betrayed from within.

The same disposition continued after the King’s arrival. This political Inquisition went on with all the eagerness imaginable in seizing of papers, in ransacking the Queen’s closet, and examining even her private letters. The Whigs had clamoured loudly, and affirmed in the face of the world that the nation had been sold to France, to Spain, to the Pretender; and whilst they endeavoured in vain, by very singular methods, to find some colour to justify what they had advanced without proof, they put themselves under an absolute necessity of grounding the most solemn prosecution on things whereof they might indeed have proof, but which would never pass for crimes before any judges but such as were parties at the same time.

In the King’s first Speech from the Throne all the inflaming hints were given, and all the methods of violence were chalked out to the two Houses. The first steps in both were perfectly answerable; and, to the shame of the peerage be it spoken, I saw at that time several lords concur to condemn in one general vote all that they had approved of in a former Parliament by many particular resolutions. Among several bloody resolutions proposed and agitated at this time, the resolution of impeaching me of high treason was taken; and I took that of leaving England, not in a panic terror improved by the artifices of the Duke of Marlborough (whom I knew even at that time too well to act by his advice or information in any case), but on such grounds as the proceedings which soon followed sufficiently justified, and as I have never repented building upon. Those who blamed it in the first heat were soon after obliged to change their language; for what other resolution could I take? The method of prosecution designed against me would have put me immediately out of condition to act for myself, or to serve those who were less exposed than me, but who were, however, in danger. On the other hand, how few were there on whose assistance I could depend, or to whom I would, even in those circumstances, be obliged? The ferment in the nation was wrought up to a considerable height; but there was at that time no reason to expect that it could influence the proceedings in Parliament in favour of those who should be accused. Left to its own movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions? The Tories who had been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour could be expected from them. The Whimsicals, disappointed of the figure which they hoped to make, began, indeed, to join their old friends. One of the principal amongst them was so very good as to confess to me that if the Court had called the servants of the late Queen to account, and had stopped there, he must have considered himself as a judge, and have acted according to his conscience on what should have appeared to him; but that war had been declared to the whole Tory party, and that now the state of things was altered. This discourse needed no commentary, and proved to me that I had never erred in the judgment I made of this set of men. Could I then resolve to be obliged to them, or to suffer with Oxford? As much as I still was heated by the disputes in which I had been all my life engaged against the Whigs, I would sooner have chose to owe my security to their indulgence than to the assistance of the Whimsicals; but I thought banishment, with all her train of evils, preferable to either. I abhorred Oxford to that degree that I could not bear to be joined with him in any case. Nothing, perhaps, contributed so much to determine me as this sentiment. A sense of honour would not have permitted me to distinguish between his case and mine own; and it was worse than death to lie under the necessity of making them the same, and of taking measures in concert with him.

I am now come to the time at which I left England, and have finished the first part of that deduction of facts which I proposed to lay before you. I am hopeful that you will not think it altogether tedious or unnecessary; for although very little of what I have said can be new to you, yet this summary account will enable you with greater ease to recall to your memory the passages of those four years wherewith all that I am going to relate to you has an immediate and necessary connection.

In what has been said I am far from making my own panegyric. I had not in those days so much merit as was ascribed to me, nor since that time have I had so little as the same persons allowed me. I committed, without dispute, many faults, and a greater man than I can pretend to be, constituted in the same circumstances, would not have kept clear of all; but with respect to the Tories I committed none. I carried the point of party honour to the height, and specified everything to my attachment to them during this period of time. Let us now examine whether I have done so during the rest.

When I arrived in France, about the end of March, 1715, the affairs of England were represented to me in another light than I had seen them in when I looked upon them with my own eyes very few weeks before. I found the persons who were detached to speak with me prepared to think that I came over to negotiate for the Pretender; and when they perceived that I was more ignorant than they imagined, I was assured by them that there would be suddenly a universal rising in England and Scotland. The leaders were named to me, their engagements specified, and many gentlemen, yourself among others, were reckoned upon for particular services, though I was certain you had never been treated with; from whence I concluded, and the event has justified my opinion, that these assurances had been given on the general characters of men by such of our friends as had embarked sooner and gone farther than the rest.

This management surprised me extremely. In the answers I made I endeavoured to set the mistake right, to show that things were far from the point of maturity imagined, that the Chevalier had yet no party for him, and that nothing could form one but the extreme violence which the Whigs threatened to exercise. Great endeavours were used to engage me in this affair, and to prevail on me to answer the letter of invitation sent me from Bar. I alleged, as it was true, that I had no commission from any person in England, and that the friends I left behind me were the only persons who could determine me, if any could, to take such a step. As to the last proposition, I absolutely refused it.

In the uncertainty of what would happen—whether the prosecutions would be pushed, which was most probable, in the manner intended against me, and against others, for all of whom, except the Earl of Oxford, I had as much concern as for myself; or whether the Whigs would relent, drop some, and soften the fate of others—I resolved to conduct myself so as to create no appearance which might be strained into a pretence for hard usage, and which might be retorted on my friends when they debated for me, or when they defended themselves. I saw the Earl of Stair; I promised him that I would enter into no Jacobite engagements, and I kept my word with him. I wrote a letter to Mr. Secretary Stanhope which might take off any imputation of neglect of the Government, and I retired into Dauphine to remove the objection of residence near the Court of France.

This retreat from Paris was censured in England, and styled a desertion of my friends and of their cause, with what foundation let any reasonable man determine. Had I engaged with the Pretender before the party acted for him, or required of me that I should do so, I had taken the air of being his man; whereas I looked on myself as theirs. I had gone about to bring them into his measures; whereas I never intended, even since that time, to do anything more than to make him as far as possible act conformably to their views.

During the short time I continued on the banks of the Rhone the prosecutions were carried on at Westminster with the utmost violence, and the ferment among the people was risen to such a degree that it could end in nothing better—it might have ended in something worse—than it did. The measures which I observed at Paris had turned to no account; on the contrary, the letter which I wrote to Mr. Secretary Stanhope was quoted as a base and fawning submission, and what I intended as a mark of respect to the Government and a service to my friends was perverted to ruin me in the opinion of the latter. The Act of Attainder, in consequence of my impeachment, had passed against me for crimes of the blackest dye; and among other inducements to pass it, my having been engaged in the Pretender’s interest was one. How well founded this Article was has already appeared; I was just as guilty of the rest. The correspondence with me was, you know, neither frequent nor safe. I heard seldom and darkly from you, and though I saw well enough which way the current ran, yet I was entirely ignorant of the measures you took, and of the use you intended to make of me. I contented myself, therefore, with letting you all know that you had but to command me, and that I was ready to venture in your service the little which remained, as frankly as I had exposed all which was gone. At last your commands came, and I shall show you in what manner I executed them.

The person who was sent to me arrived in the beginning of July, 1715, at the place where I was. He spoke in the name of all the friends whose authority could influence me, and he brought me word that Scotland was not only ready to take arms, but under some sort of dissatisfaction to be withheld from beginning; that in England the people were exasperated against the Government to such a degree that, far from wanting to be encouraged, they could not be restrained from insulting it on every occasion; that the whole Tory party was become avowedly Jacobite; that many officers of the army and the majority of the soldiers were very well affected to the cause; that the City of London was ready to rise; and that the enterprises for seizing of several places were ripe for execution: in a word, that most of the principal Tories were in a concert with the Duke of Ormond, for I had pressed particularly to be informed whether his Grace acted alone, or, if not, who were his council; and that the others were so disposed that there remained no doubt of their joining as soon as the first blow should be struck. He added that my friends were a little surprised to observe that I lay neuter in such a conjuncture. He represented to me the danger I ran of being prevented by people of all sides from having the merit of engaging early in this enterprise, and how unaccountable it would be for a man impeached and attainted under the present Government to take no share in bringing about a revolution so near at hand and so certain. He entreated that I would defer no longer to join the Chevalier, to advise and assist in carrying on his affairs, and to solicit and negotiate at the Court of France, where my friends imagined that I should not fail to meet with a favourable reception, and from whence they made no doubt of receiving assistance in a situation of affairs so critical, so unexpected, and so promising. He concluded by giving me a letter from the Pretender, whom he had seen in his way to me, in which I was pressed to repair without loss of time to Commercy; and this instance was grounded on the message which the bearer of the letter had brought me from my friends in England. Since he was sent to me, it had been more proper to have come directly where I was; but he was in haste to make his own court, and to deliver the assurances which were entrusted to him. Perhaps, too, he imagined that he should tie the knot faster on me by acquainting me that my friends had actually engaged for themselves and me, than by barely telling me that they desired I would engage for myself and them.

In the progress of the conversation he related a multitude of facts which satisfied me as to the general disposition of the people; but he gave me little satisfaction as to the measures taken for improving this disposition, for driving the business on with vigour if it tended to a revolution, or for supporting it with advantage if it spun into a war. When I questioned him concerning several persons whose disinclination to the Government admitted of no doubt, and whose names, quality, and experience were very essential to the success of the undertaking, he owned to me that they kept a great reserve, and did, at most, but encourage others to act by general and dark expressions.

I received this account and this summons ill in my bed; yet, important as the matter was, a few minutes served to determine me. The circumstances wanting to form a reasonable inducement to engage did not escape me. But the smart of a Bill of Attainder tingled in every vein; and I looked on my party to be under oppression and to call for my assistance. Besides which I considered, first, that I should certainly be informed, when I conferred with the Chevalier, of many particulars unknown to this gentleman; for I did not imagine that you could be so near to take arms, as he represented you to be, on no other foundation than that which he exposed. And, secondly, that I was obliged in honour to declare, without waiting for a more particular information of what might be expected from England, since my friends had taken their resolution to declare, without any previous assurance of what might be expected from France. This second motive weighed extremely with me at that time; there is, however, more sound than sense in it, and it contains the original error to which all your subsequent errors, and the thread of misfortunes which followed, are to be ascribed.

My resolution thus taken, I lost no time in repairing to Commercy. The very first conversations with the Chevalier answered in no degree my expectations; and I assure you, with great truth, that I began even then, if not to repent of my own rashness, yet to be fully convinced both of yours and mine.

He talked to me like a man who expected every moment to set out for England or Scotland, but who did not very well know for which. And when he entered into the particulars of his affairs I found that concerning the former he had nothing more circumstantial nor positive to go upon than what I had already heard. The advices which were sent from thence contained such assurances of success as it was hard to think that men who did not go upon the surest grounds would presume to give. But then these assurances were general, and the authority seldom satisfactory. Those which came from the best hands were verbal, and often conveyed by very doubtful messengers; others came from men whose fortunes were as desperate as their counsels; and others came from persons whose situation in the world gave little reason to attend to their judgment in matters of this kind.

The Duke of Ormond had been for some time, I cannot say how long, engaged with the Chevalier. He had taken the direction of this whole affair, as far as it related to England, upon himself, and had received a commission for this purpose, which contained the most ample powers that could be given. After this, one would be apt to imagine that the principles on which the Pretender should proceed, and the Tories engage, in this service had been laid down; that a regular and certain method of correspondence had been established; that the necessary assistances had been specified; and that positive assurances had been given of them. Nothing less. In a matter as serious as this, all was loose and abandoned to the disposition of fortune. The first point had never been touched upon; by what I have said above you see how little care was taken of the second; and as to the third, the Duke had asked a small body of regular forces, a sum of money, and a quantity of arms and ammunition. He had been told in answer by the Court of France that he must absolutely despair of any number of troops whatever, but he had been made in general to hope for some money, some arms, and some ammunition; a little sum had, I think, been advanced to him. In a case so plain as this it is hard to conceive how any man could err. The assistances demanded from France at this time, and even greater than these, will appear, in the sequel of this relation, by the sense of the whole party, to have been deemed essentially necessary to success. In such an uncertainty, therefore, whether even these could be obtained, or rather with so much reason to apprehend that they could not, it was evident that the Tories ought to have lain still. They might have helped the ferment against the Government, but should have avoided with the utmost care the giving any alarm or even suspicion of their true design, and have resumed or not resumed it as the Chevalier was able or not able to provide the troops, the arms, the money, etc. Instead of which those who were at the head of the undertaking, and therefore answerable for the measures which were pursued, suffered the business to jog merrily on. They knew in general how little dependence was to be placed on foreign succour, but acted as if they had been sure of it; while the party were rendered sanguine by their passions, and made no doubt of subverting a Government they were angry with, both one and the other made as much bustle and gave as great alarm as would have been imprudent even at the eve of a general insurrection. This appeared to me to be the state of things with respect to England when I arrived at Commercy.

The Scots had long pressed the Chevalier to come amongst them, and had of late sent frequent messages to quicken his departure, some of which were delivered in terms much more zealous than respectful. The truth is, they seemed in as much haste to begin as if they had thought themselves able to do the work alone; as if they had been apprehensive of no danger but that of seeing it taken out of their hands and of having the honour of it shared by others. However, that which was wanting on the part of England was not wanting in Scotland; the Scots talked aloud, but they were in a condition to rise. They took little care to keep their intentions secret, but they were disposed to put those intentions into immediate execution, and thereby to render the secret no longer necessary. They knew upon whom to depend for every part of the work, and they had concerted with the Chevalier even to the place of his landing.

There was need of no great sagacity to perceive how unequal such foundations were to the weight of the building designed to be raised on them. The Scots, with all their zeal and all their valour, could bring no revolution about unless in concurrence with the English; and among the latter nothing was ripe for such an undertaking but the temper of the people, if that was so. I thought, therefore, that the Pretender’s friends in the North should be kept from rising till those in the South had put themselves in a condition to act; and that in the meanwhile the utmost endeavours ought to be used with the King of France to espouse the cause; and that a plan of the design, with a more particular specification of the succours desired, as well as of the time when and the place to which they should be conveyed, ought to be written for;—all which I was told by the Marshal of Berwick, who had the principal direction at that time of these affairs in France, and I daresay very truly, had been often asked, but never sent. I looked on this enterprise to be of the nature of those which can hardly be undertaken more than once, and I judged that the success of it would depend on timing as near as possible together the insurrection in both parts of the island and the succours from hence. The Pretender approved this opinion of mine. He instructed me accordingly, and I left Lorraine after having accepted the Seals much against my inclination. I made one condition with him; it was this—that I should be at liberty to quit a station which my humour and many other considerations made me think myself very unfit for, whenever the occasion upon which I engaged was over, one way or other; and I desire you to remember that I did so.

I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715. You will observe that all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for, was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and whither they should be sent. Here I found a multitude of people at work, and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination, no order, no concert. Persons concerned in the management of these affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case. It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now. The Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the present designs as infallible. Every meeting-house which the populace demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about, without him, in a very few weeks.

Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face. Those who could write and read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this pitch of erudition had their secrets to whisper. No sex was excluded from this Ministry. Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have seen in England, kept her corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great wheel of our machine.

I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least too strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the water at the same time. The letters which came from thence seemed to me to contain rather such things as the writers wished might be true, than such as they knew to be so: and the accounts which were sent from hence were of the same kind. The vanity of some and the credulity of others supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I question not but very many persons, some such I have known, did the same thing from a principle which they took to be a very wise one: they imagined that they helped by these means to maintain and to increase the spirit of the party in England and France. They acted like Thoas, that turbulent Ætolian, who brought Antiochus into Greece: “quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias ejus, erexerat multorum in Græcia animos; iisdem et regis spem inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi.” Thus were numbers of people employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an affectation of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and in sounding the alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their interest to surprise. The Government of England was put on its guard: and the necessity of acting, or of laying aside with some disadvantage all thoughts of acting for the present, was precipitated before any measures necessary to enable you to act had been prepared, or almost thought of.

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, five hundred officers with their servants, and a considerable sum of money were demanded: and as soon as they should be informed that the Chevalier was in condition to make this provision, it was said that notice should be given him of the places to which he might send, and of the persons who were to be trusted. I do not mention some inconveniences which they touched upon arising from a delay; because their opinion was clearly for this delay, and because that they could not suppose that the Chevalier would act, or that those about him would advise him to act, contrary to the sense of all his friends in England. No time was lost in making the proper use of this paper. As much of it as was fit to be shown to this Court was translated into French, and laid before the King of France. I was now able to speak with greater assurance, and in some sort to undertake conditionally for the event of things.

The proposal of violating treaties so lately and so solemnly concluded, was a very bold one to be made to people, whatever their inclinations might be, whom the war had reduced to the lowest ebb of riches and power. They would not hear of a direct and open engagement, such as the sending a body of troops would have been; neither would they grant the whole of what was asked in the second plan. But it was impossible for them, or any one else, to foresee how far those steps which they were willing to take, well improved, might have encouraged or forced them to go. They granted us some succours, and the very ship in which the Pretender was to transport himself was fitted out by Depine d’Anicant at the King of France’s expense. They would have concealed these appearances as much as they could; but the heat of the Whigs and the resentment of the Court of England might have drawn them in. We should have been glad indirectly to concur in fixing these things upon them: and, in a word, if the late King had lived six months longer, I verily believe there had been war again between England and France. This was the only point of time when these affairs had, to my apprehension, the least reasonable appearance even of possibility: all that preceded was wild and uncertain: all that followed was mad and desperate. But this favourable aspect had an extreme short duration. Two events soon happened, one of which cast a damp on all we were doing, and the other rendered vain and fruitless all we had done. The first was the arrival of the Duke of Ormond in France, the other was the death of the King.

We had sounded the duke’s name high. His reputation and the opinion of his power were great. The French began to believe that he was able to form and to head a party; that the troops would join him; that the nation would follow the signal whenever he drew his sword; and the voice of the people, the echo of which was continually in their ears, confirmed them in this belief. But when, in the midst of all these bright ideas, they saw him arrive, almost literally alone, when, to excuse his coming, I was obliged to tell them that he could not stay, they sank at once from their hopes, and that which generally happens happened in this case: because they had had too good an opinion of the cause, they began to form too bad a one. Before this time, if they had no friendship for the Tories, they had at least some consideration and esteem. After this, I saw nothing but compassion in the best of them, and contempt in the others.

When I arrived at Paris, the King was already gone to Marly, where the indisposition which he had begun to feel at Versailles increased upon him. He was the best friend the Chevalier had: and when I engaged in this business, my principal dependence was on his personal character. This failed me to a great degree; he was not in a condition to exert the same vigour as formerly. The Ministers who saw so great an event as his death to be probably at hand, a certain minority, an uncertain regency, perhaps confusion, at best a new face of Government and a new system of affairs, would not, for their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the public, venture to engage far in any new measures. All I had to negotiate by myself first, and in conjunction with the Duke of Ormond soon afterwards, languished with the King. My hopes sank as he declined, and died when he expired. The event of things has sufficiently shown that all those which were entertained by the duke and the Jacobite party under the Regency, were founded on the grossest delusions imaginable. Thus was the project become impracticable before the time arrived which was fixed by those who directed things in England for putting it in execution.

The new Government of France appeared to me like a strange country. I was little acquainted with the roads. Most of the faces I met with were unknown to me, and I hardly understood the language of the people. Of the men who had been in power under the late reign, many were discarded, and most of the others were too much taken up with the thoughts of securing themselves under this, to receive applications in favour of the Pretender. The two men who had the greatest appearance of favour and power were D’Aguesseau and Noailles. One was made Chancellor, on the death of Voisin, from Attorney-General; and the other was placed at the head of the Treasury. The first passes for a man of parts, but he never acted out of the sphere of the law: I had no acquaintance with him before this time; and when you consider his circumstances and mine, you will not think it could be very easy for me to get access to him now. The latter I had known extremely well whilst the late King lived: and from the same Court principle, as he was glad to be well with me then, he would hardly know me now. The Minister who had the principal direction of foreign affairs I lived in friendship with, and I must own, to his honour, that he never encouraged a design which he knew that his Court had no intention of supporting.

There were other persons, not to tire you with farther particulars upon this head, of credit and influence with whom I found indirect and private ways of conversing; but it was in vain to expect any more than civil language from them in a case which they found no disposition in their Master to countenance, and in favour of which they had no prejudices of their own. The private engagements into which the Duke of Orleans had entered with his Majesty during the life of the late King will abate of their force as the Regent grows into strength, and would soon have had no force at all if the Pretender had met with success: but in these beginnings they operated very strongly. The air of this Court was to take the counterpart of all which had been thought right under Louis XIV. “Cela resemble trop à l’ancien système” was an answer so often given that it became a jest and almost a proverb. But to finish this account with a fact which is incredible, but strictly true; the very peace which had saved France from ruin, and the makers of it, were become as unpopular at this Court as at the Court of Vienna.

The Duke of Ormond flattered himself, in this state of things, that he had opened a private and sure channel of arriving at the Regent, and of bending him to his purposes. His Grace and I lived together at this time in an house which one of my friends had lent me. I observed that he was frequently lost, and that he made continual excursions out of town, with all the mysterious precaution imaginable. I doubted at first whether those intrigues related to business or pleasure. I soon discovered with whom they were carried on, and had reason to believe that both were mingled in them. It is necessary that I explain this secret to you.