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Title: Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope

Author: Lord Bolingbroke

Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5132]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 7, 2002]
[Most recently updated: May 7, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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This eBook was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.





LETTERS TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM AND MR. POPE
BY LORD BOLINGBROKE




Contents
   Introduction By Henry Morley
   Letter To Sir William Windham
   Letter To Alexander Pope



INTRODUCTION



Henry St. John, who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, was born on
the 1st of October, 1678, at the family manor of Battersea, then a
country village.  His grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there
with his wife Johanna,--daughter to Cromwell's Chief Justice, Oliver
St. John,--in one home with the child's father, Henry St. John, who
was married to the second daughter of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.
The child's grandfather, a man of high character, lived to the age
of eighty-seven; and his father, more a man of what is miscalled
pleasure, to the age of ninety.  It was chiefly by his grandfather
and grandmother that the education of young Henry St. John was cared
for.  Simon Patrick, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was for some years a
chaplain in their home.  By his grandfather and grandmother the
child's religious education may have been too formally cared for.  A
passage in Bolingbroke's letter to Pope shows that he was required
as a child to read works of a divine who "made a hundred and
nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm."

After education at Eton and Christchurch, Henry St. John travelled
abroad, and in the year 1700 he married, at the age of twenty-two,
Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winchescomb, a
Berkshire baronet.  She had much property, and more in prospect.

In the year 1701, Henry St. John entered Parliament as member for
Wotton Bassett, the family borough.  He acted with the Tories, and
became intimate with their leader, Robert Harley.  He soon became
distinguished as the ablest and most vigorous of the young
supporters of the Tory party.  He was a handsome man and a brilliant
speaker, delighted in by politicians who, according to his own image
in the Letter to Windham, "grow, like hounds, fond of the man who
shows them game."  He was active in the impeachment of Somers,
Montague, the Duke of Portland, and the Earl of Oxford for their
negotiation of the Partition Treaties.  In later years he said he
had acted here in ignorance, and justified those treaties.

James II. died at St. Germains, a pensioner of France, aged sixty-
eight, on the 6th of September, 1701.

His pretensions to the English throne passed to the son, who had
been born on the 10th of June, 1688, and whose birth had hastened on
the Revolution.  That son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who was only
thirteen years old at his father's death, is known sometimes in
history as the Old Pretender; the Young Pretender being his son
Charles Edward, whose defeat at Culloden in 1746 destroyed the last
faint hope of a restoration of the Stuarts.  It is with the young
heir to the pretensions of James II. that the story of the life of
Bolingbroke becomes concerned.

King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded
by James II.'s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old,
and had been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of
Denmark.  She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a
much-troubled mother, who had lost five children in their infancy,
besides one who survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the
year 1700.  As his death left the succession to the Crown unsettled,
an Act of Settlement, passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided
that, in case of failure of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown
should pass to the next Protestant in succession, who was Sophia,
wife of the Elector of Hanover.  The Electress Sophia was daughter
of the Princess Elizabeth who had married the Elector Palatine in
1613, granddaughter, therefore, of James I.  She was more than
seventy years old when Queen Anne began her reign.  For ardent young
Tories, who had no great interest in the limitation of authority or
enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it was no treason to think,
though it would be treason to say, that the old Electress and her
more than forty-year-old German son George, gross-minded and clumsy,
did not altogether shut out hope for the succession of a more direct
heir to the Crown.

In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of
State, and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in
under Marlborough and Godolphin, and St. John's successor was his
rival Robert Walpole.  St. John retired then for two year from
public life to his country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which
had come to him, through his wife, by the death of his wife's father
the year before.  He was thirty years old, the most brilliant of the
rising statesmen; impatient of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as
his younger rival from the other side, both of them men who, in his
eyes, were dull and slow.  St. John's quick intellect, though eager
and impatient of successful rivalry, had its philosophic turn.
During these two years of retirement he indulged the calmer love of
study and thought, whose genius he said once, in a letter to Lord
Bathurst "On the True use of Retirement and Study," "unlike the
dream of Socrates, whispered so softly, that very often I heard him
not, in the hurry of those passions by which I was transported.
Some calmer hours there were; in them I hearkened to him.
Reflection had often its turn, and the love of study and the desire
of knowledge have never quite abandoned me."

In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his
ministry as Secretary of State.  "I am thinking," wrote Swift to
Stella, "what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple
because he might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is
a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment."

It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with
France, that was against all their political interests.  The Whigs
wished to maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of
the Pretender.  In the peace negotiations nobody was so active as
Secretary St. John.  On one occasion, without consulting his
colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of Ormond, who commanded the
English army in the Netherlands:  "Her Majesty, my lord, has reason
to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the great article
of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier sent from
Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen's
positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege
or hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty.
I am at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen
would have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her
Majesty thinks you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so
as to answer her ends without owning that which might at present
have an ill effect if publicly known."  He added as a postscript:
"I had almost forgot to tell your grace that communication is given
of this order to the Court of France."  The peace was right, but the
way of making it was mean in more ways than one, and the friction
between Harley and St. John steadily increased.  St. John used his
majority in the House for the expulsion of his rival Walpole and
Walpole's imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of corruption.  In
1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of Oxford,
St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke, in
the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct.  His ill-
will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank
of Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of
Commons, where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four,
as Viscount Bolingbroke and Baron St. John.  His father's
congratulation on the peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism:
"Well, Harry, I said you would be hanged, but now I see you'll be
beheaded."

The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish
Succession, was signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713.
Queen Anne died on the 1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe
for the reaction that Bolingbroke had hoped to see.  His Letter to
Windham frankly leaves us to understand that in Queen Anne's reign
the possible succession of James II.'s son, the Chevalier de St.
George, had never been out of his mind.

The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the
throne.  The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically
ruined.  He was dismissed from office before the end of the month.
On the 26th of March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a
valet to the French messenger La Vigne.  A Secret Committee of the
House of Commons was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine
papers, and the result was Walpole's impeachment of Bolingbroke.  He
was, in September, 1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high
treason, and his name was erased from the roll of peers.  His own
account of his policy will be found in this letter to his friend Sir
William Windham, in which the only weak feature is the bitterness of
Bolingbroke's resentment against Harley.

When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few
days in Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in
Dauphiny.  His Letter to Windham tells how he became Secretary of
State to the Pretender, and how little influence he could obtain
over the Jacobite counsels.  The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in
Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to delay until there might be
some chance of success.  The death of Louis XIV., on the 1st of
September in that year, had removed the last prop of a falling
cause.

Some part of Bolingbroke's forfeited property was returned to his
wife, who pleaded in vain for the reversal of his attainder.
Bolingbroke was ill-used by the Pretender and abused by the
Jacobites.  He had been writing philosophical "Reflections upon
Exile," but when he found himself thus attacked on both sides
Bolingbroke resolved to cast Jacobitism to the winds, speak out like
a man, and vindicate himself in a way that might possibly restore
him to the service of his country.  So in April, 1717, at the age of
thirty-nine, he began work upon what is justly considered the best
of his writings, his Letter to Sir William Windham.

Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth,
who had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been
accepted by the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after
Henry St. John had been sent to the House of Lords.  Windham was
"Dear Willie" to Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was
sent to the Tower as a Jacobite.  But he had powerful connections,
was kindly and not dangerous, and was soon back in his place in the
House fighting the Whigs.  The Letter to Windham was finished in the
summer of 1717.  Its frankness was only suited to the prospect of a
pardon.  It was found that there was no such prospect, and the
Letter was not published until 1753, a year or two after its
writer's death.

Bolingbroke's first wife died in November, 1718.  He married in 1720
a Marquise de Villette, with whom he lived on an estate called La
Source, near Orleans, at the source of the small river Loiret.
There he talked and wrote philosophy.  His pardon was obtained in
May, 1723.  In 1725 he was allowed by Act of Parliament the
possession of his family inheritance; but as the attainder was not
reversed he could never again sit in Parliament.  So he came home in
1725, and bought an estate at Dawley, near Uxbridge.  There he
philosophised in his own way and played at farming, discoursed with
Pope and plied his pen against the Whigs.  In his letter to Pope,
Bolingbroke writes of ministers of religion as if they had no other
function than to maintain theological dogmas, and draws a false
conclusion from false premisses.  He died on the 12th of December,
1751.

H.M.



A LETTER TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM



I was well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind,
and in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as
much out of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had
never lived and acted together.  I depended on being forgot by them,
and was far from imagining it possible that I should be remembered
only to be condemned loudly by one half of them, and to be tacitly
censured by the greatest part of the other half.  As soon as I was
separated from the Pretender and his interest, I declared myself to
be so; and I gave directions for writing into England what I judged
sufficient to put my friends on their guard against any surprise
concerning an event which it was their interest, as well as mine,
that they should be very rightly informed about.

As soon as the Pretender's adherents began to clamour against me in
this country, and to disperse their scandal by circular letters
everywhere else, I gave directions for writing into England again.
Their groundless articles of accusation were refuted, and enough was
said to give my friends a general idea of what had happened to me,
and at least to make them suspend the fixing any opinion till such
time as I should be able to write more fully and plainly to them
myself.  To condemn no person unheard is a rule of natural equity,
which we see rarely violated in Turkey, or in the country where I am
writing:  that it would not be so with me in Great Britain, I
confess that I flattered myself.  I dwelt securely in this
confidence, and gave very little attention to any of those
scurrilous methods which were taken about this time to blast my
reputation.  The event of things has shown that I trusted too much
to my own innocence, and to the justice of my old friends.

It was obvious that the Chevalier and the Earl of Mar hoped to load
me with the imputation of treachery, incapacity, or neglect:  it was
indifferent to them of which.  If they could ascribe to one of those
their not being supported from France, they imagined that they
should justify their precipitate flight from Scotland, which many of
their fastest friends exclaimed against; and that they should
varnish over that original capital fault, the drawing the
Highlanders together in arms at the time and in the manner in which
it was done.

The Scotch, who fell at once from all the sanguine expectations with
which they had been soothed, and who found themselves reduced to
despair, were easy to be incensed; they had received no support
whatever, and it was natural for them rather to believe that they
failed of this support by my fault, than to imagine their general
had prevailed on them to rise in the very point of time when it was
impossible that they should be supported from France, or from any
other part of the world.  The Duke of Ormond, who had been the
bubble of his own popularity, was enough out of humour with the
general turn of affairs to be easily set against any particular man.
The emissaries of this Court, whose commission was to amuse, had
imposed upon him all along; and there were other busy people who
thought to find their account in having him to themselves.  I had
never been in his secret whilst we were in England together:  and
from his first coming into France he was either prevailed upon by
others, or, which I rather believe, he concurred with others, to
keep me out of it.  The perfect indifference I showed whether I was
in it or no, might carry him from acting separately, to act against
me.

The whole tribe of Irish and other papists were ready to seize the
first opportunity of venting their spleen against a man, who had
constantly avoided all intimacy with them; who acted in the same
cause, but on a different principle, and who meant no one thing in
the world less than raising them to the advantages which they
expected.

That these several persons, for the reasons I have mentioned, should
join in a cry against me, is not very marvellous; the contrary would
be so to a man who knows them as well as I do.  But that the English
Tories should serve as echoes to them--nay more, that my character
should continue doubtful at best amongst you, when those who first
propagated the slander are become ashamed of railing without proof,
and have dropped the clamour,--this I own that I never expected; and
I may be allowed to say, that as it is an extreme surprise, so it
shall be a lesson to me.

The Whigs impeached and attainted me.  They went farther--at least,
in my way of thinking, that step was more cruel than all the others-
-by a partial representation of facts, and pieces of facts, put
together as it best suited their purpose, and published to the whole
world, they did all that in them lay to expose me for a fool, and to
brand me for a knave.  But then I had deserved this abundantly at
their hands, according to the notions of party-justice.  The Tories
have not indeed impeached nor attainted me; but they have done, and
are still doing something very like to that which I took worse of
the Whigs than the impeachment and attainder:  and this, after I
have shown an inviolable attachment to the service, and almost an
implicit obedience to the will of the party; when I am actually an
outlaw, deprived of my honours, stripped of my fortune, and cut off
from my family and my country, for their sakes.

Some of the persons who have seen me here, and with whom I have had
the pleasure to talk of you, may, perhaps, have told you that, far
from being oppressed by that storm of misfortunes in which I have
been tossed of late, I bear up against it with firmness enough, and
even with alacrity.  It is true, I do so; but it is true likewise
that the last burst of the cloud has gone near to overwhelm me.
From our enemies we expect evil treatment of every sort, we are
prepared for it, we are animated by it, and we sometimes triumph in
it; but when our friends abandon us, when they wound us, and when
they take, to do this, an occasion where we stand the most in need
of their support, and have the best title to it, the firmest mind
finds it hard to resist.

Nothing kept up my spirits when I was first reduced to the very
circumstances I now describe so much as the consideration of the
delusions under which I knew that the Tories lay, and the hopes I
entertained of being able soon to open their eyes, and to justify my
conduct.  I expected that friendship, or, if that principle failed,
curiosity at least, would move the party to send over some person
from whose report they might have both sides of the question laid
before them.  Though this expectation be founded in reason, and you
want to be informed at least as much as I do to be justified, yet I
have hitherto flattered myself with it in vain.  To repair this
misfortune, therefore, as far as lies in my power, I resolve to put
into writing the sum of what I should have said in that case.  These
papers shall lie by me till time and accidents produce some occasion
of communicating them to you.  The true occasion of doing it with
advantage to the party will probably be lost; but they will remain a
monument of my justification to posterity.  At worst, if even this
fails me, I am sure of one satisfaction in writing them:  the
satisfaction of unburdening my mind to a friend, and of stating
before an equitable judge the account, as I apprehend it to stand,
between the Tories and myself--"Quantum humano consilio efficere
potui, circumspectis rebus meis omnibus, rationibusque subductis,
summam feci cogitationum mearum omnium, quam tibi, si potero,
breviter exponam."

It is necessary to my design that I call to your mind the state of
affairs in Britain from the latter part of the year 1710 to the
beginning of the year 1715, about which time we parted.  I go no
farther back because the part which I acted before that time, in the
first essays I made in public affairs, was the part of a Tory, and
so far of a piece with that which I acted afterwards.  Besides, the
things which preceded this space of time had no immediate influence
on those which happened since that time, whereas the strange events
which we have seen fall out in the king's reign were owing in a
great measure to what was done, or neglected to be done, in the last
four years of the queen's.  The memory of these events being fresh,
I shall dwell as little as possible upon them; it will be sufficient
that I make a rough sketch of the face of the Court, and of the
conduct of the several parties during that time.  Your memory will
soon furnish the colours which I shall omit to lay, and finish up
the picture.

From the time at which I left Britain I had not the advantage of
acting under the eyes of the party which I served, nor of being able
from time to time to appeal to their judgment.  The gross of what
happened has appeared; but the particular steps which led to those
events have been either concealed or misrepresented--concealed from
the nature of them or misrepresented by those with whom I never
agreed perfectly except in thinking that they and I were extremely
unfit to continue embarked in the same bottom together.  It will,
therefore, be proper to descend under this head to a more particular
relation.

In the summer of the year 1710 the Queen was prevailed upon to
change her Parliament and her Ministry.  The intrigue of the Earl of
Oxford might facilitate the means, the violent prosecution of
Sacheverel, and other unpopular measures, might create the occasion
and encourage her in the resolution; but the true original cause was
the personal ill-usage which she received in her private life and in
some trifling instances of the exercise of her power, for indulgence
in which she would certainly have left the reins of government in
those hands which had held them ever since her accession to the
throne.

I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all
parties have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to
have the government of the state in our hands; that our principal
views were the conservation of this power, great employments to
ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped
to raise us, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us.  It
is, however, true that with these considerations of private and
party interest there were others intermingled which had for their
object the public good of the nation--at least what we took to be
such.

We looked on the political principles which had generally prevailed
in our government from the Revolution in 1688 to be destructive of
our true interest, to have mingled us too much in the affairs of the
Continent, to tend to the impoverishing our people, and to the
loosening the bands of our constitution in Church and State.  We
supposed the Tory party to be the bulk of the landed interest, and
to have no contrary influence blended into its composition.  We
supposed the Whigs to be the remains of a party formed against the
ill designs of the Court under King Charles II., nursed up into
strength and applied to contrary uses by King William III., and yet
still so weak as to lean for support on the Presbyterians and the
other sectaries, on the Bank and the other corporations, on the
Dutch and the other Allies.  From hence we judged it to follow that
they had been forced, and must continue so, to render the national
interest subservient to the interest of those who lent them an
additional strength, without which they could never be the prevalent
party.  The view, therefore, of those amongst us who thought in this
manner was to improve the Queen's favour, to break the body of the
Whigs, to render their supports useless to them, and to fill the
employments of the kingdom, down to the meanest, with Tories.  We
imagined that such measures, joined to the advantages of our numbers
and our property, would secure us against all attempts during her
reign, and that we should soon become too considerable not to make
our terms in all events which might happen afterwards:  concerning
which, to speak truly, I believe few or none of us had any very
settled resolution.

In order to bring these purposes about, I verily think that the
persecution of Dissenters entered into no man's head.  By the Bills
for preventing Occasional Conformity and the growth of schism, it
was hoped that their sting would be taken away.  These Bills were
thought necessary for our party interest, and, besides, were deemed
neither unreasonable nor unjust.  The good of society may require
that no person should be deprived of the protection of the
Government on account of his opinions in religious matters; but it
does not follow from hence that men ought to be trusted in any
degree with the preservation of the Establishment, who must, to be
consistent with their principles, endeavour the subversion of what
is established.  An indulgence to consciences, which the prejudice
of education and long habits have rendered scrupulous, may be
agreeable to the rules of good policy and of humanity, yet will it
hardly follow from hence that a government is under any obligation
to indulge a tenderness of conscience to come, or to connive at the
propagating of these prejudices and at the forming of these habits.
The evil effect is without remedy, and may, therefore, deserve
indulgence; but the evil cause is to be prevented, and can,
therefore, be entitled to none.  Besides this, the Bills I am
speaking of, rather than to enact anything new, seemed only to
enforce the observation of ancient laws which had been judged
necessary for the security of the Church and State at a time when
the memory of the ruin of both, and of the hands by which that ruin
had been wrought, was fresh in the minds of men.

The Bank, the East India Company, and in general the moneyed
interest, had certainly nothing to apprehend like what they feared,
or affected to fear, from the Tories--an entire subversion of their
property.  Multitudes of our own party would have been wounded by
such a blow.  The intention of those who were the warmest seemed to
me to go no farther than restraining their influence on the
Legislature, and on matters of State; and finding at a proper season
means to make them contribute to the support and ease of a
government under which they enjoyed advantages so much greater than
the rest of their fellow-subjects.  The mischievous consequence
which had been foreseen and foretold too, at the establishment of
those corporations, appeared visibly.  The country gentlemen were
vexed, put to great expenses and even baffled by them in their
elections; and among the members of every parliament numbers were
immediately or indirectly under their influence.  The Bank had been
extravagant enough to pull off the mask; and, when the Queen seemed
to intend a change in her ministry, they had deputed some of their
members to represent against it.  But that which touched sensibly
even those who were but little affected by other considerations, was
the prodigious inequality between the condition of the moneyed men
and of the rest of the nation.  The proprietor of the land, and the
merchant who brought riches home by the returns of foreign trade,
had during two wars borne the whole immense load of the national
expenses; whilst the lender of money, who added nothing to the
common stock, throve by the public calamity, and contributed not a
mite to the public charge.

As to the Allies, I saw no difference of opinion among all those who
came to the head of affairs at this time.  Such of the Tories as
were in the system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon
after from us, and such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion
deserted to us, seemed equally convinced of the unreasonableness,
and even of the impossibility, of continuing the war on the same
disproportionate footing.  Their universal sense was, that we had
taken, except the part of the States General, the whole burden of
the war upon us, and even a proportion of this; while the entire
advantage was to accrue to others:  that this had appeared very
grossly in 1709, and 1710, when preliminaries were insisted upon,
which contained all that the Allies, giving the greatest loose to
their wishes, could desire, and little or nothing on the behalf of
Great Britain:  that the war, which had been begun for the security
of the Allies, was continued for their grandeur:  that the ends
proposed, when we engaged in it, might have been answered long
before, and therefore that the first favourable occasion ought to be
seized of making peace; which we thought to be the interest of our
country, and which appeared to all mankind, as well as to us, to be
that of our party.

These were in general the views of the Tories:  and for the part I
acted in the prosecution of them, as well as of all the measures
accessory to them, I may appeal to mankind.  To those who had the
opportunity of looking behind the curtain I may likewise appeal, for
the difficulties which lay in my way, and for the particular
discouragements which I met with.  A principal load of parliamentary
and foreign affairs in their ordinary course lay upon me:  the whole
negotiation of the peace, and of the troublesome invidious steps
preliminary to it, as far as they could be transacted at home, were
thrown upon me.  I continued in the House of Commons during that
important session which preceded the peace; and which, by the spirit
shown through the whole course of it, and by the resolutions taken
in it, rendered the conclusion of the treaties practicable.  After
this I was dragged into the House of Lords in such a manner as to
make my promotion a punishment, not a reward; and was there left to
defend the treaties almost alone.

It would not have been hard to have forced the Earl of Oxford to use
me better.  His good intentions began to be very much doubted of;
the truth is, no opinion of his sincerity had ever taken root in the
party, and, which was worse perhaps for a man in his station, the
opinion of his capacity began to fall apace.  He was so hard pushed
in the House of Lords in the beginning of 1712 that he had been
forced, in the middle of the session, to persuade the Queen to make
a promotion of twelve peers at once, which was an unprecedented and
invidious measure, to be excused by nothing but the necessity, and
hardly by that.  In the House of Commons his credit was low and my
reputation very high.  You know the nature of that assembly; they
grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose
halloo they are used to be encouraged.  The thread of the
negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going
back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made
himself master of the business much time would have been lost, and
great inconveniences would have followed.  Some, who opposed the
Court soon after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the
inclination I should have wanted no help to do mischief.  I knew the
way of quitting my employments and of retiring from Court when the
service of my party required it; but I could not bring myself up to
that resolution, when the consequence of it must have been the
breaking my party and the distress of the public affairs.  I thought
my mistress treated me ill, but the sense of that duty which I owed
her came in aid of other considerations, and prevailed over my
resentment.  These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of fashion
that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a bubble in
the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true
motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the
troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under
the utmost satisfaction.  I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce
the friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for
Oxford.  I was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and
little means which he employed then, and continued to employ
afterwards, to ruin me in the opinion of the Queen and everywhere
else.  I saw, however, that he had no friendship for anybody, and
that with respect to me, instead of having the ability to render
that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire, an addition of strength
to himself, it became the object of his jealousy and a reason for
undermining me.  In this temper of mind I went on till the great
work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at Utrecht;
after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as well
as for me, opened itself.

I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led
to them, exempt from faults.  Many were made no doubt in both by
those who were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and
many were owing purely to the opposition they met with in every step
of their progress.  I never look back on this great event, passed as
it is, without a secret emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness
of the undertaking and the importance of its success, with the means
employed to bring it about, and with those which were employed to
traverse it.  To adjust the pretensions and to settle the interests
of so many princes and states as were engaged in the late war would
appear, when considered simply and without any adventitious
difficulty, a work of prodigious extent.  But this was not all.
Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands to
the most extravagant height.  They had been encouraged to this,
first, by the engagements which we had entered into with several of
them, with some to draw them into the war, with others to prevail on
them to continue it; and, secondly, by the manner in which we had
treated with France in 1709 and 1710.  Those who intended to tie the
knot of the war as hard, and to render the coming at a peace as
impracticable as they could, had found no method so effectual as
that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on all he could think
of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these concessions
should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands.  That this
was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one of
the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who
communicated to me and to two others of the Queen's Ministers an
instance of the Duke of Marlborough's management at a critical
moment, when the French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed inclinable
to come into an expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh article
of the preliminaries, which could not have been refused.  Certain it
is that the King of France was at that time in earnest to execute
the article of Philip's abdication, and therefore the expedients for
adjusting what related to this article would easily enough have been
found, if on our part there had been a real intention of concluding.
But there was no such intention, and the plan of those who meant to
prolong the war was established among the Allies as the plan which
ought to be followed whenever a peace came to be treated.  The
Allies imagined that they had a right to obtain at least everything
which had been demanded for them respectively, and it was visible
that nothing less would content them.  These considerations set the
vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient light.

The importance of succeeding in the work of the peace was equally
great to Europe, to our country, to our party, to our persons, to
the present age, and to future generations.  But I need not take
pains to prove what no man will deny.  The means employed to bring
it about were in no degree proportionable.  A few men, some of whom
had never been concerned in business of this kind before, and most
of whom put their hands for a long time to it faintly and
timorously, were the instruments of it.  The Minister who was at
their head showed himself every day incapable of that attention,
that method, that comprehension of different matters, which the
first post in such a Government as ours requires in quiet times.  He
was the first spring of all our motion by his credit with the Queen,
and his concurrence was necessary to everything we did by his rank
in the State, and yet this man seemed to be sometimes asleep and
sometimes at play.  He neglected the thread of business, which was
carried on for this reason with less dispatch and less advantage in
the proper channels, and he kept none in his own hands.  He
negotiated, indeed, by fits and starts, by little tools and indirect
ways, and thus his activity became as hurtful as his indolence, of
which I could produce some remarkable instances.  No good effect
could flow from such a conduct.  In a word, when this great affair
was once engaged, the zeal of particular men in their several
provinces drove it forward, though they were not backed by the
concurrent force of the whole Administration, nor had the common
helps of advice till it was too late, till the very end of the
negotiations; even in matters, such as that of commerce, which they
could not be supposed to understand.  That this is a true account of
the means used to arrive at the peace, and a true character of that
Administration in general, I believe the whole Cabinet Council of
that time will bear me witness.  Sure I am that most of them have
joined with me in lamenting this state of things whilst it
subsisted, and all those who were employed as Ministers in the
several parts of the treaty felt sufficiently the difficulties which
this strange management often reduced them to.  I am confident they
have not forgotten them.

If the means employed to bring the peace about were feeble, and in
one respect contemptible, those employed to break the negotiation
were strong and formidable.  As soon as the first suspicion of a
treaty's being on foot crept abroad in the world the whole alliance
united with a powerful party in the nation to obstruct it.  From
that hour to the moment the Congress of Utrecht finished, no one
measure possible to be taken was omitted to traverse every advance
that was made in this work, to intimidate, to allure, to embarrass
every person concerned in it.  This was done without any regard
either to decency or good policy, and from hence it soon followed
that passion and humour mingled themselves on each side.  A great
part of what we did for the peace, and of what others did against
it, can be accounted for on no other principle.  The Allies were
broken among themselves before they began to treat with the common
enemy.  The matter did not mend in the course of the treaty, and
France and Spain, but especially the former, profited of this
disunion.

Whoever makes the comparison, which I have touched upon, will see
the true reasons which rendered the peace less answerable to the
success of the war than it might and than it ought to have been.
Judgment has been passed in this case as the different passions or
interests of men have inspired them.  But the real cause lay in the
constitution of our Ministry, and much more in the obstinate
opposition which we met with from the Whigs and from the Allies.
However, sure it is that the defects of the peace did not occasion
the desertions from the Tory party which happened about this time,
nor those disorders in the Court which immediately followed.

Long before the purport of the treaties could be known, those Whigs
who had set out with us in 1710 began to relapse back to their
party.  They had among us shared the harvest of a new Ministry, and,
like prudent persons, they took measures in time to have their share
in that of a new Government.

The whimsical or the Hanover Tories continued zealous in appearance
with us till the peace was signed.  I saw no people so eager for the
conclusion of it.  Some of them were in such haste that they thought
any peace preferable to the least delay, and omitted no instances to
quicken their friends who were actors in it.  As soon as the
treaties were perfected and laid before the Parliament, the scheme
of these gentlemen began to disclose itself entirely.  Their love of
the peace, like other passions, cooled by enjoyment.  They grew nice
about the construction of the articles, could come up to no direct
approbation, and, being let into the secret of what was to happen,
would not preclude themselves from the glorious advantage of rising
on the ruins of their friends and of their party.

The danger of the succession and the badness of the peace were the
two principles on which we were attacked.  On the first the
whimsical Tories joined the Whigs, and declared directly against
their party.  Although nothing is more certain than this truth:
that there was at that time no formed design in the party, whatever
views some particular men might have, against his Majesty's
accession to the throne.  On the latter, and most other points, they
affected a most glorious neutrality.

Instead of gathering strength, either as a Ministry or as a party,
we grew weaker every day.  The peace had been judged, with reason,
to be the only solid foundation whereupon we could erect a Tory
system; and yet when it was made we found ourselves at a full stand.
Nay, the very work which ought to have been the basis of our
strength was in part demolished before our eyes, and we were stoned
with the ruins of it.  Whilst this was doing, Oxford looked on as if
he had not been a party to all which had passed; broke now and then
a jest, which savoured of the Inns of Court and the bad company in
which he had been bred.  And on those occasions where his station
obliged him to speak of business, was absolutely unintelligible.

Whether this man ever had any determined view besides that of
raising his family is, I believe, a problematical question in the
world.  My opinion is that he never had any other.  The conduct of a
Minister who proposes to himself a great and noble object, and who
pursues it steadily, may seem for a while a riddle to the world;
especially in a Government like ours, where numbers of men,
different in their characters and different in their interests, are
at all times to be managed; where public affairs are exposed to more
accidents and greater hazards than in other countries; and where, by
consequence, he who is at the head of business will find himself
often distracted by measures which have no relation to his purpose,
and obliged to bend himself to things which are in some degree
contrary to his main design.  The ocean which environs us is an
emblem of our government, and the pilot and the Minister are in
similar circumstances.  It seldom happens that either of them can
steer a direct course, and they both arrive at their port by means
which frequently seem to carry them from it.  But as the work
advances the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities
clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it
is once consummated the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and
so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he
could have done the same.  But, on the other hand, a man who
proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of
ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is
eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both, who begins every
day something new, and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose
awhile on the world; but a little sooner or a little later the
mystery will be revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched
under it but a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of
which never extended farther than living from day to day.  Which of
these pictures resembles Oxford most you will determine.  I am sorry
to be obliged to name him so often, but how is it possible to do
otherwise while I am speaking of times wherein the whole turn of
affairs depended on his motions and character?

I have heard, and I believe truly, that when he returned to Windsor
in the autumn of 1713, after the marriage of his son, he pressed
extremely to have him created Duke of Newcastle or Earl of Clare,
and the Queen presuming to hesitate on so extraordinary a proposal,
he resented this hesitation in a manner which little became a man
who had been so lately raised by the profusion of her favours upon
him.  Certain it is, that he began then to show a still greater
remissness in all parts of his Ministry, and to affect to say that
from such a time, the very time I am speaking of, he took no share
in the direction of affairs, or words to that effect.

He pretended to have discovered intrigues which were set on foot
against him, and particularly he complained of the advantage which
was taken of his absence during the journey he made at his son's
marriage to undermine him with the Queen.  He is naturally inclined
to believe the worst, which I take to be a certain mark of a mean
spirit and a wicked soul.  At least, I am sure that the contrary
quality, when it is not due to weakness of understanding, is the
fruit of a generous temper and an honest heart.  Prone to judge ill
of all mankind, he will rarely be seduced by his credulity, but I
never knew a man so capable of being the bubble of his distrust and
jealousy.  He was so in this case, although the Queen, who could not
be ignorant of the truth, said enough to undeceive him.  But to be
undeceived, and to own himself so, was not his play.  He hoped by
cunning to varnish over his want of faith and of ability.  He was
desirous to make the world impute the extraordinary part, or, to
speak more properly, the no part, which he acted with the staff of
Treasurer in his hand, to the Queen's withdrawing her favour from
him and to his friends abandoning him--pretences utterly groundless
when he first made them, and which he brought to be real at last.
Even the winter before the Queen's death, when his credit began to
wane apace, he might have regained it; he might have reconciled
himself perfectly with all his ancient friends, and have acquired
the confidence of the whole party.  I say he might have done all
this, because I am persuaded that none of those I have named were so
convinced of his perfidy, so jaded with his yoke, or so much piqued
personally against him as I was; and yet if he would have exerted
himself in concert with us to improve the few advantages which were
left us and to ward off the visible danger which threatened our
persons and our party, I would have stifled my private animosity and
would have acted under him with as much zeal as ever.  But he was
incapable of taking such a turn.  The sum of all his policy had been
to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long as he
could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them.  When it
became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly
at the end of his line.

By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the
intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had
endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.

The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution
in the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded,
and by the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of
a new administration.  Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect
to them and to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be
brought about before he could effectually serve either.  You cannot
have forgot how things which we pressed were put off upon every
occasion till the peace; the peace was to be the date of a new
administration, and the period at which the millenary year of
Toryism should begin.  Thus were the Tories at that time amused; and
since my exile I have had the opportunity of knowing certainly and
circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in the same manner,
and that the Pretender was made, through the French Minister, to
expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as soon as
the peace had rendered them practicable.  He was to attempt nothing,
his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.

After many delays, fatal to the general interest of Europe, this
peace was signed:  and the only considerable thing which he brought
about afterwards was the marriage I have mentioned above; and by it
an accession of riches and honour to a family whose estate was very
mean, and whose illustration before this time I never met with
anywhere, but in the vain discourses which he used to hold over
claret.  If he kept his word with any of the parties above-
mentioned, it must be supposed that he did so with the Whigs; for as
to us, we saw nothing after the peace but increase of mortification
and nearer approaches to ruin.  Not a step was made towards
completing the settlement of Europe, which the treaties of Utrecht
and Radstadt left imperfect; towards fortifying and establishing the
Tory party; towards securing those who had been the principal actors
in this administration against future events.  We had proceeded in a
confidence that these things should immediately follow the
conclusion of the peace:  he had never, I dare swear, entertained a
thought concerning them.  As soon as the last hand was given to the
fortune of his family, he abandoned his mistress, his friends, and
his party, who had borne him so many years on their shoulders:  and
I was present when this want of faith was reproached him in the
plainest and strongest terms by one of the honestest men in Britain,
and before some of the most considerable Tories.  Even his impudence
failed him on this occasion:  he did not so much as attempt an
excuse.

He could not keep his word which he had given the Pretender and his
adherents, because he had formed no party to support him in such a
design.  He was sure of having the Whigs against him if he made the
attempt, and he was not sure of having the Tories for him.

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 AEtolian, who brought Antiochus into
Greece:  "quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias
ejus, erexerat multorum in Graecia 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 a l'ancien systeme" 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.

Mrs. Trant, whom I have named above, had been preparing herself for
the retired abstemious life of a Carmelite by taking a surfeit of
the pleasures of Paris, when, a little before the death of the
Queen, or about that time, she went into England.  What she was
entrusted either by the Chevalier, or any other person, to negotiate
there, I am ignorant of; and it imports not much to know.  In that
journey she made or renewed an acquaintance with the Duke of Ormond.
The scandalous chronicle affirms that she brought with her, when she
returned into France, a woman of whom I have not the least
knowledge, but who was probably handsome, since without beauty such
a merchandise would not have been saleable, nor have answered the
design of the importer; and that she made this way her court to the
Regent.  Whatever her merit was, she kept a correspondence with him,
and put herself upon that foot of familiarity which he permits all
those who contribute to his pleasures to assume.  She was placed by
him, as she told me herself, where I found her some time after that
which I am speaking of, in the house of an ancient gentlewoman who
had formerly been Maid of Honour to Madame, and who had contracted
at Court a spirit of intrigue which accompanied her in her retreat.

These two had associated to them the Abbe de Tesieu in all the
political parts of their business; for I will not suppose that so
reverend an ecclesiastic entered into any other secret.  This Abbe
is the Regent's secretary; and it was chiefly through him that the
private treaty had been carried on between his master and the Earl
of Stair in the King's reign.  Whether the priest had stooped at the
lure of a cardinal's hat, or whether he acted the second part by the
same orders that he acted the first, I know not.  This is sure, and
the British Minister was not the bubble of it--that whilst he
concerted measures on one hand to traverse the Pretender's designs,
he testified on the other all the inclination possible to his
service.  A mad fellow who had been an intendant in Normandy, and
several other politicians of the lowest form, were at different
times taken into this famous Junto.

With these worthy people his Grace of Ormond negotiated; and no care
was omitted on his part to keep me out of the secret.  The reason of
which, as far as I am able to guess at, shall be explained to you
by-and-by.  I might very justly have taken this proceeding ill, and
the duke will not be able to find in my whole conduct towards him
anything like it; I protest to you very sincerely I was not in the
least moved at it.

He advanced not a step in his business with these sham Ministers,
and yet imagined that he got daily ground.  I made no progress with
the true ones, but I saw it.  These, however, were not our only
difficulties.  We lay under another, which came from your side, and
which embarrassed us more.  The first hindered us from working
forward to our point of view, but the second took all point of view
from us.

A paper was sent into England just before the death of the King of
France, which had been drawn by me at Chaville in concert with the
Dukes of Ormond and Berwick, and with Monsieur de Torcy.  This paper
was an answer to the memorial received from thence.  The state of
this country was truly represented in it:  the difference was fixed
between what had been asked, and what might be expected from France;
and upon the whole it was demanded what our friends would do, and
what they would have us to do.  The reply to this came through the
French Secretary of State to our hands.  They declared themselves
unable to say anything till they should see what turn affairs would
take on so great an event as the death of the King, the report of
which had reached them.

Such a declaration shut our mouths and tied our hands.  I confess I
knew neither how to solicit, nor what to solicit; this last message
suspending the project on which we had acted before, and which I
kept as an instruction constantly before my eyes.  It seemed to me
uncertain whether you intended to go on, or whether your design was
to stifle, as much as possible, all past transactions; to lie
perfectly still; to throw upon the Court the odium of having given a
false alarm; and to wait till new accidents at home, and a more
favourable conjuncture abroad, might tempt you to resume the
enterprise.  Perhaps this would have been the wisest game you could
have played:  but then you should have concerted it with us who
acted for you here.  You intended no such thing, as appeared
afterwards:  and therefore those who acted for the party at London,
whoever they were, must be deemed inexcusable for leaving things on
the foot of this message, and giving us no advice fit to be depended
upon for many weeks.  Whilst preparations were to be made, and the
work was to be set a-going by assistance from hence, you might
reasonably expect to hear from us, and to be determined by us:  but
when all hopes of this kind seemed to be gone, it was your part to
determine us; and we could take no resolution here but that of
conforming ourselves to whatever should come prescribed from
England.

Whilst we were in this condition, the most desperate that can be
imagined, we began to receive verbal messages from you that no more
time was to be lost, and that the Chevalier should come away.  No
man was, I believe, ever so embarrassed as I found myself at that
time.  I could not imagine that you would content yourselves by
loose verbal messages, after all that had happened, to call us over;
and I knew by experience how little such messages are to be depended
on.  For soon after I engaged in these affairs, a monk arrived at
Bar, despatched, as he affirmed, by the Duke of Ormond, in whose
name he insisted that the Chevalier should hasten into Britain, and
that nothing but his presence was wanting to place the crown on his
head.  The fellow delivered his errand so positively, and so
circumstantially, that the resolution was taken at Bar to set out,
and my rendezvous to join the Chevalier was appointed me.  This
method to fetch a King, with as little ceremony as one would invite
a friend to supper, appeared somewhat odd to me, who was then very
new in these affairs.  But when I came to talk with the man, for by
good luck he had been sent for from Bar to Paris, I easily discerned
that he had no such commission as he pretended to, and that he acted
of his own head.  I presumed to oppose the taking any resolution
upon his word, though he was a monk:  and soon after we knew from
the Duke of Ormond himself that he had never sent him.

This example made me cautious; but that which determined my opinion
was, that I could never imagine, without supposing you all run mad,
that the same men who judged this attempt unripe for execution,
unless supported by regular troops from France, or at least by all
the other assistances which are enumerated above, while the design
was much more secret than at present; when the King had no fleet at
sea, nor more than eight thousand men dispersed over the whole
island; when we had the good wishes of the French Court on our side,
and were sure of some particular assistances, and of a general
connivance; that the same men, I say, should press for making it now
without any other preparation, when we had neither money, arms,
ammunition, nor a single company of foot; when the Government of
England was on its guard, national troops were raised, foreign
forces sent for, and France, like all the rest of the Continent,
against us.  I could not conceive such a strange combination of
accidents as should make the necessity of acting increase gradually
upon us as the means of doing so were taken from us.

Upon the whole matter, my opinion was, and I did not observe the
Duke of Ormond to differ from me, that we should wait till we heard
from you in such a manner as might assure us of what you intended to
do yourselves, and of what you expected from us; and that in the
meanwhile we should go as far as the little money which we had, and
the little favour which was shown us would allow, in getting some
embarkations ready on the coast.

Sir George Byng had come into the road of Havre, and had demanded by
name several ships which belonged to us to be given up to him.  The
Regent did not think fit to let him have the ships; but he ordered
them to be unloaded, and their cargoes were put into the King's
magazines.  We were in no condition to repair the loss; and
therefore when I mention embarkations, you will please to understand
nothing more than vessels to transport the Pretender's person and
the persons of those who should go over with him.  This was all we
could do, and this was not neglected.

We were thus employed when a gentleman arrived from Scotland to
represent the state of that country, and to require a definitive
answer from the Chevalier whether he would have the insurrection to
be made immediately, which they apprehended they might not be able
to make at all if they were obliged to defer it much longer.  This
gentleman was sent instantly back again, and was directed to let the
persons he came from know that the Chevalier was desirous to have
the rising of his friends in England and Scotland so adjusted that
they might mutually assist each other and distract the enemy; that
he had not received a final answer from his friends in England, but
that he was in daily expectation of it; that it was very much to be
wished that all attempts in Scotland could be suspended till such
time as the English were ready; but that if the Scots were so
pressed that they must either submit or rise immediately, he was of
opinion they should rise, and he would make the best of his way to
them.

What this forwardness in the Scots and this uncertainty and
backwardness in the English must produce, it was not hard to
foresee; and, therefore, that I might neglect nothing in my power to
prevent any false measures--as I was conscious to myself that I had
neglected nothing to promote true ones--I despatched a gentleman to
London, where I supposed the Earl of Mar to be, some days before the
message I have just spoken of was sent to Scotland.  I desired him
to make my compliments to Lord Mar, and to tell him from me that I
understood it to be his sense, as well as the sense of all our
friends, that Scotland could do nothing effectually without the
concurrence of England, and that England would not stir without
assistance from abroad; that he might assure himself no such
assistance could be depended upon; and that I begged of him to make
the inference from these propositions.  The gentleman went; but upon
his arrival at London he found that the Earl of Mar was already set
out to draw the Highlanders into arms.  He communicated his message
to a person of confidence, who undertook to send it after his
lordship; and this was the utmost which either he or I could do in
such a conjuncture.

You were now visibly departed from the very scheme which you had
sent us over, and from all the principles which had been ever laid
down.  I did what I could to keep up my own spirit, as well as the
spirits of the Chevalier, and of all those with whom I was in
correspondence:  I endeavoured even to deceive myself.  I could not
remedy the mischief, and I was resolved to see the conclusion of the
perilous adventure; but I own to you that I thought then, and that I
have not changed my opinion since, that such measures as these would
not be pursued by any reasonable man in the most common affairs of
life.  It was with the utmost astonishment that I saw them pursued
in the conduct of an enterprise which had for its object nothing
less than the disposition of crowns, and for the means of bringing
it about nothing less than a civil war.

Impatient that we heard nothing from England, when we expected every
moment to hear that the war was begun in Scotland, the Duke of
Ormond and I resolved to send a person of confidence to London.  We
instructed him to repeat to you the former accounts which we had
sent over, to let you know how destitute the Chevalier was either of
actual support or even of reasonable hopes, and to desire that you
would determine whether he should go to Scotland or throw himself on
some part of the English coast.  This person was further instructed
to tell you that, the Chevalier being ready to take any resolution
at a moment's warning, you might depend on his setting out the
instant he received your answer; and, therefore, that to save time,
if your intention was to rise, you would do well to act immediately,
on the assurance that the plan you prescribed, be it what it would,
should be exactly complied with.  We took this resolution the rather
because one of the packets, which had been prepared in cypher to
give you an account of things, which had been put above three weeks
before into Monsieur de Torcy's hands, and which by consequence we
thought to be in yours, was by this time sent back to me by this
Minister (I think, open), with an excuse that he durst not take upon
him to forward it.

The person despatched to London returned very soon to us, and the
answer he brought was, that since affairs grew daily worse, and
could not mend by delay, our friends in England had resolved to
declare immediately, and that they would be ready to join the
Chevalier on his landing; that his person would be as safe there as
in Scotland, and that in every other respect it was better that he
should land in England; that they had used their utmost endeavours,
and that they hoped the western counties were in a good posture to
receive him.  To this was added a general indication of the place he
should come to, as near to Plymouth as possible.

You must agree that this was not the answer of men who knew what
they were about.  A little more precision was necessary in dictating
a message which was to have such consequences, and especially since
the gentleman could not fail to acquaint the persons he spoke with
that the Chevalier was not able to carry men enough to secure him
from being taken up even by the first constable.  Notwithstanding
this, the Duke of Ormond set out from Paris and the Chevalier from
Bar.  Some persons were sent to the North of England and others to
London to give notice that they were both on their way.  Their
routes were so ordered that the Duke of Ormond was to sail from the
coast of Normandy some days before the Chevalier arrived at St.
Malo, to which place the duke was to send immediate notice of his
landing; and two gentlemen acquainted with the country, and
perfectly well known to all our friends in those parts, were
despatched before, that the people of Devonshire and Somersetshire,
who were, we concluded, in arms, might be apprised of the signals
which were to be made from the ships, and might be ready to receive
the duke.

On the coast of France, and before his embarkation, the duke heard
that several of our principal friends had been seized immediately
after the person who came last from them had left London, that the
others were all dispersed, and that the consternation was universal.
He embarked, notwithstanding this melancholy news, and, supported by
nothing but the firmness of his temper, he went over to the place
appointed; he did more than his part, and he found that our friends
had done less than theirs.  One of the gentlemen who had passed over
before him, and had traversed part of the country, joined him on the
coast, and assured him that there was not the least room to expect a
rising; in a word, he was refused a night's lodging in a country
which we had been told was in a good posture to receive the
Chevalier, and where the duke expected that multitudes would repair
to him.

He returned to the coast of Brittany after this uncomfortable
expedition, where the Chevalier arrived about the same time from
Lorraine.  What his Grace proposed by the second attempt, which he
made as soon as the vessel could be refitted, to land in the same
part of the island, I profess myself to be ignorant.  I wrote him my
opinion at the time, and I have always thought that the storm in
which he had like to have been cast away, and which forced him back
to the French coast, saved him from a much greater peril--that of
perishing in an attempt as full of extravagant rashness, and as void
of all reasonable meaning, as any of those adventures which have
rendered the hero of La Mancha immortal.

The Chevalier had now but one of these two things left him to do:
one was to return to Bar; the other was to go to Scotland, where
there were people in arms for him.  He took this last resolution.
He left Brittany, where he had as many Ministers as there were
people about him, and where he was eternally teased with noisy
disputes about what was to be done in circumstances in which no
reasonable thing could be done.  He sent to have a vessel got ready
for him at Dunkirk, and he crossed the country as privately as he
could.

Whilst all these things passed I remained at Paris to try if by any
means some assistance might be at last procured, without which it
was evident, even to those who flattered themselves the most, that
the game was up.

No sooner was the Duke of Ormond gone from Paris on the design which
I have mentioned, and Mrs. Trant, who had accompanied him part of
the way, returned, but I was sent for to a little house at Madrid,
in the Bois de Boulogne, where she lived with Mademoiselle de
Chaussery, the ancient gentlewoman with whom the Duke of Orleans had
placed her.  These two persons opened to me what had passed whilst
the Duke of Ormond was here, and the hopes they had of drawing the
Regent into all the measures necessary to support the attempts which
were making in favour of the Chevalier.

By what they told me at first I saw that they had been trusted, and
by what passed in the course of my treating with them it appeared
that they had the access which they pretended to.  All which I had
been able to do by proper persons and in proper methods, since the
King of France's death, amounting to little or nothing, I resolved,
at last, to try what was to be done by this indirect way.  I put
myself under the conduct of these female managers, and without
having the same dependence on them as his Grace of Ormond had, I
pushed their credit and their power as far as they reached during
the time I continued to see them.  I met with smoother language and
greater hopes than had been given me hitherto.  A note signed by the
Regent, supposed to be written to a woman, but which was to be
explained to be intended for the Earl of Mar, was put into my hands
to be sent to Scotland.  I took a copy of it, which you may see at
the end of these papers.  When Sir John Areskine came to press for
succour, the Regent was prevailed upon by these women to see him;
but he carried nothing real back with him except a quantity of gold,
part of the money which we had drawn from Spain, and which was lost,
with the vessel, in a very odd manner, on the Scotch coast.  The
Duke of Ormond had been promised seven or eight thousand arms, which
were drawn out of the magazines, and said to be lodged, I think, at
Compiegne.  I used my utmost efforts that these arms might be
carried forward to the coast, and I undertook for their
transportation, but all was in vain, so that the likelihood of
bringing anything to effect in time appeared to me no greater than I
had found it before I entered into this intrigue.

I soon grew tired of a commerce which nothing but success could
render tolerable, and resolved to be no longer amused by the
pretences which were daily repeated to me, that the Regent had
entertained personal prejudices against me, and that he was
insensibly and by degrees to be dipped in our measures; that both
these things required time, but that they would certainly be brought
about, and that we should then be able to answer all the
expectations of the English and the Scotch.  The first of these
pretences contained a fact which I could hardly persuade myself to
be true, because I knew very certainly that I had never given His
Royal Highness the least occasion for such prejudices; the second
was a work which might spin out into a great and uncertain length.
I took my resolution to drive what related to myself to an immediate
explanation, and what related to others to an immediate decision;
not to suffer any excuse for doing nothing to be founded on my
conduct, nor the salvation, if I could hinder it, of so many gallant
men as were in arms in Scotland, to rest on the success of such
womanish projects.  I shall tell you what I did on the first head
now, and what I did on the second, hereafter, in its proper place.

The fact which it was said the Regent laid to my charge was a
correspondence with Lord Stair, and having been one night at his
house from whence I did not retire till three in the morning.  As
soon as I got hold of this I desired the Marshal of Berwick to go to
him.  The Marshal told him, from me, that I had been extremely
concerned to hear in general that I lay under his displeasure; that
a story, which it was said he believed, had been related to me; that
I expected the justice, which he could deny to no man, of having the
accusation proved, in which case I was contented to pass for the
last of humankind, or of being justified if it could not be proved.
He answered that such a story had been related to him by such
persons as he thought would not have deceived him; that he had been
since convinced that it was false, and that I should be satisfied of
his regard for me; but that he must own he was very uneasy to find
that I, who could apply to him through the Marshal d'Huxelles, could
choose to treat with Mrs. Trant and the rest; for he named all the
cabal, except his secretary, whom I had never met at Mademoiselle
Chaussery's.  He added that these people teased him, at my
instigation, to death, and that they were not fit to be trusted with
any business.  He applied to some of them the severest epithets.
The Marshal of Berwick replied that he was sure I should receive the
whole of what he had been pleased to say with the greatest
satisfaction; that I had treated with those persons much against my
will; and, finally, that if his Royal Highness would not employ them
he was sure I would never apply to them.  In a conversation which I
had not long after with him he spoke to me in much the same terms as
he had done to the Marshal.  I went from him very ill edified as to
his intentions of doing anything in favour of the Chevalier; but I
carried away with me this satisfaction, that he had assigned me,
from his own mouth, the person through whom I should make my
applications to him, and through whom I should depend on receiving
his answers; that he had disavowed all the little politic clubs, and
had commanded me to have no more to do with them.

Before I resume the thread of my narration give me leave to make
some reflection upon what I have been last saying to you.  When I
met with the Duke of Ormond at his return from the coast, he thought
himself obliged to say something to excuse his keeping me out of a
secret which during his absence I had been let into.  His excuse was
that the Regent had exacted from him that I should know nothing of
the matter.  You will observe that the account which I have given
you seems to contradict this assertion of his Grace, since it is
hard to suppose that if the Regent had exacted that I should be kept
out of the secret, these women would have dared to have let me into
it, and since it is still harder to suppose that the Regent would
make this express condition with the Duke of Ormond, and the moment
the duke's back was turned would suffer these women to tease him
from me and to bring me answers from him.  I am, however, far from
taxing the duke with affirming an untruth.  I believe the Regent did
make such a condition with him; and I will tell you how I understand
all this little management, which will explain a great deal to you.
This Prince, with wit and valour, has joined all the irresolution of
temper possible, and is, perhaps, the man in the world the least
capable of saying "no" to your face.  From hence it happened that
these women, like multitudes of other people, forced him to say and
do enough to give them the air of having credit with him and of
being trusted by him.  This drew in the Duke of Ormond, who is not,
I daresay, as yet undeceived.  The Regent never intended from the
first to do anything, even indirectly, in favour of the Jacobite
cause.  His interest was plainly on the other side, and he saw it.
But then the same weakness in his character carried him, as it would
have done his great-uncle Gaston in the same case, to keep measures
with the Chevalier.  His double-trimming character prevailed on him
to talk with the Duke of Ormond, but it carried him no farther.  I
question not but he did, on this occasion, what you must have
observed many men to do:  we not only endeavour to impose on the
world, but even on ourselves; we disguise our weakness, and work up
in our minds an opinion that the measure which we fall into by the
natural or habitual imperfection of our character is the effect of a
principle of prudence or of some other virtue.  Thus the Regent, who
saw the Duke of Ormond because he could not resist the importunity
of Olive Trant, and who gave hopes to the duke because he can refuse
nobody, made himself believe that it was a great strain of policy to
blow up the fire and to keep Britain embroiled.  I am persuaded that
I do not err in judging that he thought in this manner, and here I
fix the reason of his excluding me out of the commerce which he had
with the Duke of Ormond, of his affecting a personal dislike of me,
and of his avoiding any correspondence with me upon these matters,
till I forced myself in a manner upon him, and he could not keep me
any longer at a distance without departing from his first principle-
-that of keeping measures with everybody.  He then threw me, or let
me slide if you will, into the hands of these women; and when he
found that I pressed him hard that way, too, he took me out of their
hands and put me back again into the proper channel of business,
where I had not been long, as you will see by-and-by, before the
scene of amusement was finished.

Sir John Areskine told me when he came from the first audience that
he had of his Royal Highness, that he put him in mind of the
encouragement which he had given the Earl of Mar to take arms.  I
never heard anything of this kind but what Sir John let drop to me.
If the fact be true, you see that the Scotch general had been amused
by him with a witness.  The English general was so in his turn; and
while this was doing, the Regent might think it best to have him to
himself.  Four eyes comprehend more objects than two, and I was a
little better acquainted with the characters of people, and the mass
of the country, than the duke, though this Court had been at first a
strange country to me in comparison of the former.

An infinity of little circumstances concurred to make me form this
opinion, some of which are better felt than explained, and many of
which are not present to my memory.  That which had the greatest
weight with me, and which is, I think, decisive, I will mention.  At
the very time when it is pretended that the Regent treated with the
Duke of Ormond on the express condition that I should know nothing
of the matter, two persons of the first rank and greatest credit in
this Court, when I made the most pressing instances to them in
favour of the Chevalier, threw out in conversation to me that I
should attach myself to the Duke of Orleans, that in my
circumstances I might want him, and that he might have occasion for
me.  Something was intimated of pensions and establishment, and of
making my peace at home.  I would not understand this language,
because I would not break with the people who held it:  and when
they saw that I would not take the hints, they ceased to give them.

I fancy that you see by this time the motives of the Regent's
conduct.  I am not, I confess, able to explain to you those of the
Duke of Ormond's; I cannot so much as guess at them.  When he came
into France, I was careful to show him all the friendship and all
the respect possible.  My friends were his, my purse was his, and
even my bed was his.  I went further; I did all those things which
touch most sensibly people who have been used to pomp.  I made my
court to him, and haunted his levee with assiduity.  In return to
this behaviour--which was the pure effect of my goodwill, and which
no duty that I owed his Grace, no obligation that I had to him,
imposed upon me--I have great reason to suspect that he went at
least half way in all which was said or done against me.  He threw
himself blindly into the snare which was laid for him; and instead
of hindering, as he and I in concert might have done, those affairs
from languishing in the manner they did several months, he furnished
this Court with an excuse for not treating with me, till it was too
late to play even a saving game; and he neither drove the Regent to
assist the Chevalier, nor to declare that he would not assist him;
though it was fatal to the cause in general, and to the Scotch in
particular, not to bring one of the two about.

It was Christmas 1715 before the Chevalier sailed for Scotland.  The
battle of Dunblain had been fought, the business of Preston was
over:  there remained not the least room to expect any commotion in
his favour among the English; and many of the Scotch who had
declared for him began to grow cool in the cause.  No prospect of
success could engage him in this expedition:  but it was become
necessary for his reputation.  The Scotch on one side spared not to
reproach him, I think unjustly, for his delay; and the French on the
other were extremely eager to have him gone.  Some of those who knew
little of British affairs imagined that his presence would produce
miraculous effects.  You must not be surprised at this.  As near
neighbours as we are, ninety-nine in an hundred among the French are
as little acquainted with the inside of our island as with that of
Japan.  Others of them were uneasy to see him skulking about in
France, and to be told of it every hour by the Earl of Stair.
Others, again, imagined that he might do their business by going
into Scotland, though he should not do his own:  this is, they
flattered themselves that he might keep a war for some time alive,
which would employ the whole attention of our Government; and for
the event of which they had very little concern.  Unable from their
natural temper, as well as their habits, to be true to any
principle, they thought and acted in this manner, whilst they
affected the greatest friendship to the King, and whilst they really
did desire to enter into new and more intimate engagements with him.
Whilst the Pretender continued in France they could neither avow
him, nor favour his cause:  if he once set his foot on Scotch
ground, they gave hopes of indirect assistance; and if he could
maintain himself in any corner of the island, they could look upon
him, it was said, as a king.  This was their language to us.  To the
British Minister they denied, they forswore, they renounced; and yet
the man of the best head in all their councils, being asked by Lord
Stair what they intended to do, answered, before he was aware, that
they pretended to be neuters.  I leave you to judge how this slip
was taken up.

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
Spar, who pressed him on his side as I pressed him on mine, and
promised, besides the arrears of the subsidy due to the Swedes, an
immediate advance of fifty thousand crowns for the enterprise on
Britain.  He kept the officer who was to be despatched I know not
how long booted; sometimes on pretence that in the low state of his
credit he could not find bills of exchange for the sum, and
sometimes on other pretences, and by these delays he evaded his
promise.  The French were very frank in declaring that they could
give us no money, and that they would give us no troops.  Arms,
ammunition, and connivance they made us hope for.  The latter, in
some degree, we might have had perhaps; but to what purpose was it
to connive, when by a multitude of little tricks they avoided
furnishing us with arms and ammunition, and when they knew that we
were utterly unable to furnish ourselves with them?  I had formed
the design of engaging French privateers in the Pretender's service.
They were to have carried whatever we should have had to send to any
part of Britain in their first voyage, and after that to have
cruised under his commission.  I had actually agreed for some, and
it was in my power to have made the same bargains with others.
Sweden on one side and Scotland on the other would have afforded
them retreats.  And if the war had been kept up in any part of the
mountains, I conceive the execution of this design would have been
of the greatest advantage to the Pretender.  It failed because no
other part of the work went on.  He was not above six weeks in his
Scotch expedition, and these were the things I endeavoured to bring
to bear in his absence.  I had no great opinion of my success before
he went; but when he had made the last step which it was in his
power to make, I resolved to suffer neither him nor the Scotch to be
any longer bubbles of their own credulity and of the scandalous
artifice of this Court.  It would be tedious to enter into a longer
narrative of all the useless pains I took.  To conclude, therefore;
in a conversation which I had with the M. d'Huxelles, I took
occasion to declare that I would not be the instrument of amusing
the Scotch, and that, since I was able to do them no other service,
I would at least inform them that they must flatter themselves no
longer with hopes of succour from France.  I added that I would send
them vessels which, with those already on the coast of Scotland,
might serve to bring off the Pretender, the Earl of Mar, and as many
others as possible.  The Marshal approved my resolution, and advised
me to execute it as the only thing which was left to do.  On this
occasion he showed no reserve, he was very explicit; and yet in this
very point of time the promise of an order was obtained, or
pretended to be obtained, from the Regent for delivering those
stores of arms and ammunition which belonged to the Chevalier, and
which had been put into the French magazines when Sir George Byng
came to Havre.  Castel Blanco is a Spaniard who married a daughter
of Lord Melford, and who under that title set up for a meddler in
English business.  I cannot justly tell whether the honour of
obtaining this promise was ascribed to him, to the Junto in the Bois
de Boulogne, or to any one else.  I suppose they all assumed a share
of the merit.  The project was that these stores should be delivered
to Castel Blanco; that he should enter into a recognisance to carry
them to Spain, and from thence to the West Indies; that I should
provide a vessel for this purpose, which he should appear to hire or
buy; and that when she was at sea she should sail directly for
Scotland.  You cannot believe that I reckoned much on the effect of
this order, but accustomed to concur in measures the inutility of
which I saw evidently enough, I concurred in this likewise.  The
necessary care was taken, and in a fortnight's time the ship was
ready to sail, and no suspicion of her belonging to the Chevalier or
of her destination was gone abroad.

As this event made no alteration in my opinion, it made none in the
despatches which I prepared and sent to Scotland.  In them I gave an
account of what was in negotiation.  I explained to him what might
be hoped for in time if he was able to maintain himself in the
mountains without the succours he demanded from France.  But from
France I told him plainly that it was in vain to expect the least
part of them.  In short, I concealed nothing from him.  This was all
I could do to put the Chevalier and his council in a condition to
judge what measures to take; but these despatches never came to his
hands.  He was sailed from Scotland just before the gentleman whom I
sent arrived on the coast.  He landed at Graveline about the 22nd of
February, and the first orders he gave were to stop all the vessels
which were going on his account to the country from whence he came.

I saw him the morning after his arrival at St. Germains, and he
received me with open arms.  I had been, as soon as we heard of his
return, to acquaint the French Court with it.  They were not a
little uneasy; and the first thing which the M. d'Huxelles said to
me upon it was that the Chevalier ought to proceed to Bar with all
the diligence possible, and to take possession of his former asylum
before the Duke of Lorraine had time to desire him to look out for a
residence somewhere else.  Nothing more was meant by this proposal
than to get him out of the dominions of France immediately.  I was
not in my mind averse to it for other reasons.  Nothing could be
more disadvantageous to him than to be obliged to pass the Alps, or
to reside in the Papal territory on this side of them.  Avignon was
already named for his retreat in common conversation, and I know not
whether from the time he left Scotland he ever thought of any other.
I imagined that by surprising the Duke of Lorraine we should furnish
that Prince with an excuse to the King and to the Emperor; that we
might draw the matter into length, and gain time to negotiate some
other retreat than that of Avignon for the Chevalier.  The duke's
goodwill there was no room to doubt of, and by what the Prince of
Vaudemont told me at Paris some time afterwards I am apt to think we
should have succeeded.  In all events, it could not be wrong to try
every measure, and the Pretender would have gone to Avignon with
much better grace when he had done, in the sight of the world, all
he could to avoid it.

I found him in no disposition to make such haste; he had a mind, on
the contrary, to stay some time at St. Germains, and in the
neighbourhood of Paris, and to have a private meeting with the
Regent.  He sent me back to Paris to solicit this meeting.  I wrote,
I spoke, to the Marshal d'Huxelles; I did my best to serve him in
his own way.  The Marshal answered me by word of mouth and by
letter; he refused me by both.  I remember he added this
circumstance:  that he found the Regent in bed, and acquainted him
with what the Chevalier desired; that the Regent rose up in a
passion, said that the things which were asked were puerilities, and
swore that he would not see him.  I returned without having been
able to succeed in my commission; and I confess I thought the want
of success on this occasion no great misfortune.

It was two or three o'clock on the Sunday or Monday morning when I
parted from the Pretender.  He acquiesced in the determination of
the Regent, and declared that he would instantly set out for
Lorraine; his trunks were packed, his chaise was ordered to be at
the door at five, and I sent to Paris to acquaint the Minister that
he was gone.  He asked me how soon I should be able to follow him,
gave me commissions for some things which he desired I should bring
after him, and, in a word, no Italian ever embraced the man he was
going to stab with greater show of affection and confidence.

Instead of taking post for Lorraine he went to the little house in
the Bois de Boulogne where his female Ministers resided; and there
he continued lurking for several days, and pleasing himself with the
air of mystery and business, whilst the only real business which he
should have had at that time lay neglected.  He saw the Spanish and
Swedish Ministers in this place.  I cannot tell, for I never thought
it worth asking, whether he saw the Duke of Orleans; possibly he
might.  To have been teased into such a step, which signified
nothing, and which gave the cabal an air of credit and importance,
is agreeable enough to the levity of his Royal Highness's character.

The Thursday following, the Duke of Ormond came to see me, and after
the compliment of telling me that he believed I should be surprised
at the message he brought, he put into my hands a note to himself
and a little scrip of paper directed to me, and drawn in the style
of a justice of peace's warrant.  They were both in the Chevalier's
handwriting, and they were dated on the Tuesday, in order to make me
believe that they had been written on the road and sent back to the
duke; his Grace dropped in our conversation with great dexterity all
the insinuations proper to confirm me in this opinion.  I knew at
this time his master was not gone, so that he gave me two very
risible scenes, which are frequently to be met with when some people
meddle in business; I mean that of seeing a man labour with a great
deal of awkward artifice to make a secret of a nothing, and that of
seeing yourself taken for a bubble when you know as much of the
matter as he who thinks that he imposes on you.

I cannot recollect precisely the terms of the two papers.  I
remember that the kingly laconic style of one of them, and the
expression of having no further occasion for my service, made me
smile.  The other was an order to give up the papers in my office,
all which might have been contained in a letter-case of a moderate
size.  I gave the duke the Seals and some papers which I could
readily come at.  Some others--and, indeed, all such as I had not
destroyed--I sent afterwards to the Chevalier; and I took care to
convey to him by a safe hand several of his letters which it would
have been very improper the duke should have seen.  I am surprised
that he did not reflect on the consequence of my obeying his order
literally.  It depended on me to have shown his general what an
opinion the Chevalier had of his capacity.  I scorned the trick, and
would not appear piqued when I was far from being angry.  As I gave
up without scruple all the papers which remained in my hands,
because I was determined never to make use of them, so I confess to
you that I took a sort of pride in never asking for those of mine
which were in the Pretender's hands; I contented myself with making
the duke understand how little need there was to get rid of a man in
this manner who had made the bargain which I had done at my
engagement, and with taking this first opportunity to declare that I
would never more have to do with the Pretender or his cause.

That I might avoid being questioned and quoted in the most curious
and the most babbling town in the world, I related what had passed
to three or four of my friends, and hardly stirred abroad during a
fortnight out of a little lodging which very few people knew of.  At
the end of this term the Marshal of Berwick came to see me, and
asked me what I meant to confine myself to my chamber when my name
was trumpeted about in all the companies of Paris, and the most
infamous stories were spread concerning me.  This was the first
notice I had, and it was soon followed by others.  I appeared
immediately in the world, and found there was hardly a scurrilous
tongue which had not been let loose on my subject; and that those
persons whom the Duke of Ormond and Earl of Mar must influence, or
might silence, were the loudest in defaming me.

Particular instances wherein I had failed were cited; and as it was
the fashion for every Jacobite to affect being in the secret, you
might have found a multitude of vouchers to facts which, if they had
been true, could in the nature of them be known to very few persons.

This method of beating down the reputation of a man by noise and
impudence imposed on the world at first, convinced people who were
not acquainted with me, and staggered even my friends.  But it
ceased in a few days to have any effect against me.  The malice was
too gross to pass upon reflection.  These stories died away almost
as fast as they were published, for this very reason, because they
were particular.

They gave out, for instance, that I had taken to my own use a very
great sum of the Chevalier's money, when it was notorious that I had
spent a great sum of my own in his service, and never would be
obliged to him for a farthing, in which case, I believe, I was
single.  Upon this head it was easy to appeal to a very honest
gentleman, the Queen's Treasurer at St. Germains, through whose
hands, and not through mine, went the very little money which the
Chevalier had.

They gave out that whilst he was in Scotland he never heard from me,
though it was notorious that I sent him no less than five expresses
during the six weeks which he consumed in this expedition.  It was
easy, on this head, to appeal to the persons to whom my despatches
had been committed.

These lies, and many others of the same sort, which were founded on
particular facts, were disproved by particular facts, and had not
time--at least at Paris--to make any impression.  But the principal
crime with which they charged me then, and the only one which since
that time they have insisted upon, is of another nature.  This part
of their accusation is general, and it cannot be refuted without
doing what I have done above, deducing several facts, comparing
these facts together, and reasoning upon them; nay, that which is
worse is, that it cannot be fully refuted without the mention of
some facts which, in my present circumstances, it would not be very
prudent, though I should think it very lawful, for me to divulge.
You see that I mean the starving the war in Scotland, which it is
pretended might have been supported, and might have succeeded, too,
if I had procured the succours which were asked--nay, if I had sent
a little powder.  This the Jacobites who affect moderation and
candour shrug their shoulders at:  they are sorry for it, but Lord
Bolingbroke can never wash himself clean of this guilt; for these
succours might have been obtained, and a proof that they might is
that they were so by others.  These people leave the cause of this
mismanagement doubtful between my treachery and my want of capacity.
The Pretender, with all the false charity and real malice of one who
sets up for devotion, attributes all his misfortunes to my
negligence.

The letters which were written by my secretary, above a year ago,
into England; the marginal notes which have been made since to the
letter from Avignon; and what is said above, have set this affair in
so clear a light, that whoever examines, with a fair intention, must
feel the truth, and be convinced by it.  I cannot, however, forbear
to make some observations on the same subject here.  It is even
necessary that I should do so, in the design of making this
discourse the foundation of my justification to the Tories at
present, and to the whole world in time.

There is nothing which my enemies apprehend so much as my
justification:  and they have reason.  But they may comfort
themselves with this reflection--that it will be a misfortune which
will accompany me to my grave, that I suffered a chain of accidents
to draw me into such measures and such company; that I have been
obliged to defend myself against such accusations and such accusers;
that by associating with so much folly and so much knavery I am
become the victim of both; that I was distressed by the former, when
the latter would have been less grievous to me, since it is much
better in business to be yoked to knaves than fools; and that I put
into their hands the means of loading me, like the scape-goat, with
all the evil consequences of their folly.

In the first letters which I received from the Earl of Mar he wrote
for arms, for ammunition, for money, for officers, and all things
frankly, as if these things had been ready, and I had engaged to
supply him with them, before he set up the standard at the Brae of
Mar; whereas our condition could not be unknown to his lordship; and
you have seen that I did all I could to prevent his reckoning on any
assistance from hence.  As our hopes at this Court decreased, his
lordship rose in his demands; and at the time when it was visible
that the Regent intended nothing less than even privately and
indirectly to support the Scotch, the Pretender and the Earl of Mar
wrote for regular forces and a train of artillery, which was in
effect to insist that France should enter into a war for them.  I
might, in answer to the first instances, have asked Lord Mar what he
did in Scotland, and what he meant by drawing his countrymen into a
war at this time, or at least upon this foot?  He who had dictated
not long before a memorial wherein it was asserted that to have a
prospect of succeeding in this enterprise there must be a universal
insurrection, and that such an insurrection was in no sort probable,
unless a body of troops was brought to support it?  He who thought
that the consequence of failing, when the attempt was once made,
must be the utter ruin of the cause and the loss of the British
liberty?  He who concurred in demanding as a pis-aller, and the
least which could be insisted on, arms, ammunition, artillery,
money, and officers?  I say, I might have asked what he meant to
begin the dance when he had not the least assurance of any succour,
but, on the contrary, the greatest reason imaginable to believe this
affair was become as desperate abroad by the death of the most
Christian King as it was at home by the discovery of the design and
by the measures taken to defeat it?

Instead of acting this part, which would have been wise, I took that
which was plausible.  I resolved to contribute all I could to
support the business, since it was begun.  I encouraged his lordship
as long as I had the least ground for doing so, and I confirmed the
Pretender in his resolution of going to Scotland when he had nothing
better left him to do.  If I have anything to reproach myself with
in the whole progress of the war in Scotland, it is having
encouraged Lord Mar too long.  But, on the other hand, if I had
given up the cause, and had written despondingly to him before this
Court had explained itself as fully as the Marshal d'Huxelles did in
the conversation which is mentioned above, it is easy to see what
turn would have been given to such a conduct.

The true cause of all the misfortunes which happened to the Scotch
and to those who took arms in the North of England lies here--that
they rose without any previous certainty of foreign help, in direct
contradiction to the scheme which their leaders themselves had
formed.  The excuse which I have heard made for this is that the Act
of Parliament for curbing the Highlanders was near to be put in
execution; that they would have been disarmed, and entirely disabled
from rising at any other time, if they had not rose at this.  You
can judge better than I of the validity of this excuse.  It seems to
me that by management they might have gained time, and that even
when they had been reduced to the dilemma supposed, they ought to
have got together under pretence of resisting the infractions of the
Union without any mention of the Pretender, and have treated with
the Government on this foot.  By these means they might probably
have preserved themselves in a condition of avowing their design
when they should be sure of being backed from abroad.  At the worst,
they might have declared for the Chevalier when all other expedients
failed them.  In a word, I take this excuse not to be very good, and
the true reason of this conduct to have been the rashness of the
people and the inconsistent measures of their head.

But admitting the excuse to be valid, it remains still an undeniable
truth that this is the original fountain from whence all those
waters of bitterness flowed which so many unhappy people have drunk
of.  I have said already that the necessity of acting was
precipitated before any measures to act with success had been taken,
and that the necessity of doing so seemed to increase as the means
of doing so were taken away.  To whom is this to be ascribed?  Is it
to be ascribed to me, who had no share in these affairs till a few
weeks before the Duke of Ormond was forced to abandon England, and
the discovery of the intended invasion was published to Parliament
and to the world? or is it to be ascribed to those who had from the
first been at the head of this undertaking?

Unable to defend this point, the next resort of the Jacobites is to
this impudent and absurd affirmation--that, notwithstanding the
disadvantages under which they took arms, they should have succeeded
if the indirect assistances which were asked from France had been
obtained.  Nay, that they should have been able to defend the
Highlands if I had sent them a little powder.  Is it possible that a
man should be wounded with such blunt weapons?  Much more than
powder was asked for from the first, and I have already said that
when the Chevalier came into Scotland, regular troops, artillery,
etc., were demanded.  Both he and the Earl of Mar judged it
impossible to stand their ground without such assistance as these.
How scandalous, then, must it be deemed that they suffer their
dependents to spread in the world that for want of a little powder I
forced them to abandon Scotland!  The Earl of Mar knows that all the
powder in France would not have enabled him to stay at Perth as long
as he did if he had not had another security.  And when that failed
him, he must have quitted the party, if the Regent had given us all
that he made some of us expect.

But to finish all that I intend to say on a subject which has tired
me, and perhaps you; the Jacobites affirm that the indirect
assistances which they desired, might have been obtained; and I
confess that I am inexcusable if this fact be true.  To prove it,
they appeal to the little politicians of whom I have spoken so
often.  I affirm, on the contrary, that nothing could be obtained
here to support the Scotch or to encourage the English.  To prove
the assertion, I appeal to the Ministers with whom I negotiated, and
to the Regent himself, who, whatever language he may hold in private
with other people, cannot controvert with me the truth of what I
advance.  He excluded me formerly, that he might the more easily
avoid doing anything; and perhaps he has blamed me since, that he
might excuse his doing nothing.  All this may be true, and yet it
will remain true that he would never have been prevailed upon to act
directly against his interest in the only point of view which he
has--I mean, the crown of France--and against the unanimous sense of
all his Ministers.  Suppose that in the time of the late Queen, when
she had the peace in view, a party in France had implored her
assistance, and had applied to Margery Fielding, to Israel, to my
Lady Oglethorpe, to Dr. Battle, and Lieutenant-General Stewart, what
success do you imagine such applications would have had?  The Queen
would have spoke them fair--she would speak otherwise to nobody; but
do you imagine she would have made one step in their favour?  Olive
Trant, Magny, Mademoiselle Chaussery, a dirty Abbe Brigault, and Mr.
Dillon, are characters very apposite to these.  And what I suppose
to have passed in England is not a whit more ridiculous than what
really passed here.

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 by which I should have been tied down, not
only from ever engaging against him, but also from making my peace
at home.  The Chevalier cut this gordian knot asunder at one blow.
He broke the links of that chain which former engagements had
fastened on me, and gave me a right to esteem myself as free from
all obligations of keeping measures with him as I should have
continued if I had never engaged in his interest.  I took therefore,
from that moment, the resolution of making my peace at home, and of
employing all the unfortunate experience I had acquired abroad to
undeceive my friends and to promote the union and the quiet of my
country.

The Earl of Stair had received a full power to treat with me whilst
I was engaged with the Pretender, as I have been since informed.  He
had done me the justice to believe me incapable to hearken, in such
circumstances, to any proposals of that kind; and as much friendship
as he had for me, as much as I had for him, we entertained not the
least even indirect correspondence together during that whole time.
Soon afterwards he employed a person to communicate to me the
disposition of his Majesty to grant me my pardon, and his own desire
to give me, on this occasion, all the proofs he could of his
inclination in my favour.  I embraced the offer, as it became me to
do, with all possible sense of the King's goodness, and of his
lordship's friendship.  We met, we talked together, and he wrote to
the Court on the subject.  The turn which the Ministers gave to this
matter was, to enter into a treaty to reverse my attainder, and to
stipulate the conditions on which this act of grace should be
granted me.

The notion of a treaty shocked me.  I resolved never to be restored
rather than go that way to work; and I opened myself without any
reserve to Lord Stair.  I told him that I looked on myself to be
obliged in honour and in conscience to undeceive my friends in
England, both as to the state of foreign affairs, as to the
management of the Jacobite interest abroad, and as to the characters
of persons--in every one of which points I knew them to be most
grossly and most dangerously deluded; that the treatment I had
received from the Pretender and his adherents would justify me to
the world in doing this; that if I remained in exile all my life, he
might be assured that I would never more have to do with the
Jacobite cause; and that if I was restored, I should give it an
effectual blow, in making that apology which the Pretender has put
me under a necessity of making:  that in doing this I flattered
myself that I should contribute something to the establishment of
the King's Government, and to the union of his subjects; but that
this was all the merit which I could promise to have; that if the
Court believed these professions to be sincere, a treaty with me was
unnecessary for them; and that if they did not believe them so, a
treaty with them was dangerous for me; that I was determined in this
whole transaction to make no one step which I would not own in the
face of the world; that in other circumstances it might be
sufficient to act honestly, but that in a case as extraordinary as
mine it was necessary to act clearly, and to leave no room for the
least doubtful construction.

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 him on their own terms, they are labouring to do it without
any terms; that is, to speak properly, they are ready to receive him
on his.  Be not deceived:  there is not a man on this side of the
water who acts in any other manner.  The Church of England Jacobite
and the Irish Papist seem in every respect to have the same cause.
Those on your side of the water who correspond with these are to be
comprehended in the same class; and from hence it is that the
clamour raised against me has been kept up with so much industry,
and is redoubled on the least appearance of my return home, and of
my being in a situation to justify myself.

You have seen already what reasons the Pretender, and the several
sorts of people who compose his party here, had to get rid of me,
and to cover me to the utmost of their power with infamy.  Their
views were as short in this case as they are in all others.  They
did not see at first that this conduct would not only give me a
right, but put me under a necessity of keeping no farther measures
with them, and of laying the whole mystery of their iniquity open.
As soon as they discovered this, they took the only course which was
left them--that of poisoning the minds of the Tories, and of
creating such prejudices against me whilst I remained in a condition
of not speaking for myself, as will they hope prevent the effect of
whatever I may say when I am in a condition of pleading my own
cause.  The bare apprehension that I shall show the world that I
have been guilty of no crime renders me criminal among these men;
and they hold themselves ready, being unable to reply either in
point of fact or in point of reason, to drown my voice in the
confusion of their clamour.

The only crimes I am guilty of, I own.  I own the crime of having
been for the Pretender in a very different manner from those with
whom I acted.  I served him as faithfully, I served him as well as
they; but I served him on a different principle.  I own the crime of
having renounced him, and of being resolved never to have to do with
him as long as I live.  I own the crime of being determined sooner
or later, as soon as I can, to clear myself of all the unjust
aspersions which have been cast upon me; to undeceive by my
experience as many as I can of those Tories who may have been drawn
into error; and to contribute, if ever I return home, as far as I am
able, to promote the national good of Britain without any other
regard.  These crimes do not, I hope, by this time appear to you to
be of a very black dye.  You may come, perhaps, to think them
virtues, when you have read and considered what remains to be said;
for before I conclude, it is necessary that I open one matter to you
which I could not weave in sooner without breaking too much the
thread of my narration.  In this place, unmingled with anything
else, it will have, as it deserves to have, your whole attention.

Whoever composed that curious piece of false fact, false argument,
false English, and false eloquence, the letter from Avignon, says
that I was not thought the most proper person to speak about
religion.  I confess I should be of his mind, and should include his
patrons in my case, if the practice of it was to be recommended; for
surely it is unpardonable impudence to impose by precept what we do
not teach by example.  I should be of the same mind, if the nature
of religion was to be explained, if its mysteries were to be
fathomed, and if this great truth was to be established--that the
Church of England has the advantage over all other Churches in
purity of doctrine, and in wisdom of discipline.  But nothing of
this kind was necessary.  This would have been the task of reverend
and learned divines.  We of the laity had nothing more to do than to
lay in our claim that we could never submit to be governed by a
Prince who was not of the religion of our country.  Such a
declaration could hardly have failed of some effect towards opening
the eyes and disposing the mind even of the Pretender.  At least, in
justice to ourselves, and in justice to our party, we who were here
ought to have made it; and the influence of it on the Pretender
ought to have become the rule of our subsequent conduct.

In thinking in this manner I think no otherwise now than I have
always thought; and I cannot forget, nor you neither, what passed
when, a little before the death of the Queen, letters were conveyed
from the Chevalier to several persons--to myself among others.  In
the letter to me the article of religion was so awkwardly handled
that he made the principal motive of the confidence we ought to have
in him to consist in his firm resolution to adhere to Popery.  The
effect which this epistle had on me was the same which it had on
those Tories to whom I communicated it at that time; it made us
resolve to have nothing to do with him.

Some time after this I was assured by several, and I make no doubt
but others have been so too, that the Chevalier at the bottom was
not a bigot; that whilst he remained abroad and could expect no
succour, either present or future, from any Princes but those of the
Roman Catholic Communion, it was prudent, whatever he might think,
to make no demonstration of a design to change; but that his temper
was such, and he was already so disposed, that we might depend on
his compliance with what should be desired of him if ever he came
amongst us, and was taken from under the wing of the Queen his
mother.  To strengthen this opinion of his character, it was said
that he had sent for Mr. Leslie over; that he allowed him to
celebrate the Church of England service in his family; and that he
had promised to hear what this divine should represent on the
subject of religion to him.  When I came abroad, the same things,
and much more, were at first insinuated to me; and I began to let
them make impression upon me, notwithstanding what I had seen under
his hand.  I would willingly flatter myself that this impression
disposed me to incline to Jacobitism rather than allow that the
inclination to Jacobitism disposed me easily to believe what, upon
that principle, I had so much reason to wish might be true.  Which
was the cause, and which the effect, I cannot well determine:
perhaps they did mutually occasion each other.  Thus much is
certain--that I was far from weighing this matter as I ought to have
done when the solicitation of my friends and the persecution of my
enemies precipitated me into engagements with the Pretender.

I was willing to take it for granted that since you were as ready to
declare as I believed you at that time, you must have had entire
satisfaction on the article of religion.  I was soon undeceived;
this string had never been touched.  My own observation, and the
unanimous report of all those who from his infancy have approached
the Pretender's person, soon taught me how difficult it is to come
to terms with him on this head, and how unsafe to embark without
them.

His religion is not founded on the love of virtue and the
detestation of vice; on a sense of that obedience which is due to
the will of the Supreme Being, and a sense of those obligations
which creatures formed to live in a mutual dependence on one another
lie under.  The spring of his whole conduct is fear.  Fear of the
horns of the devil and of the flames of hell.  He has been taught to
believe that nothing but a blind submission to the Church of Rome
and a strict adherence to all the terms of that communion can save
him from these dangers.  He has all the superstition of a Capuchin,
but I found on him no tincture of the religion of a prince.  Do not
imagine that I loose the reins to my imagination, or that I write
what my resentments dictate:  I tell you simply my opinion.  I have
heard the same description of his character made by those who know
him best, and I conversed with very few among the Roman Catholics
themselves who did not think him too much a Papist.

Nothing gave me from the beginning so much uneasiness as the
consideration of this part of his character, and of the little care
which had been taken to correct it.  A true turn had not been given
to the first steps which were made with him.  The Tories who engaged
afterwards, threw themselves, as it were, at his head.  He had been
suffered to think that the party in England wanted him as much as he
wanted them.  There was no room to hope for much compliance on the
head of religion when he was in these sentiments, and when he
thought the Tories too far advanced to have it in their power to
retreat; and little dependence was at any time to be placed on the
promises of a man capable of thinking his damnation attached to the
observance, and his salvation to the breach, of these very promises.
Something, however, was to be done, and I thought that the least
which could be done was to deal plainly with him, and to show him
the impossibility of governing our nation by any other expedient
than by complying with that which would be expected from him as to
his religion.  This was thought too much by the Duke of Ormond and
Mr. Leslie; although the duke could be no more ignorant than the
minister how ill the latter had been used, how far the Chevalier had
been from keeping the word which he had given, and on the faith of
which Mr. Leslie had come over to him.  They both knew that he not
only refused to hear himself, but that he sheltered the ignorance of
his priests, or the badness of his cause, or both, behind his
authority, and absolutely forbade all discourse concerning religion.
The duke seemed convinced that it would be time enough to talk of
religion to him when he should be restored, or, at soonest, when he
should be landed in England; that the influence under which he had
lived being at a distance, the reasonableness of what we might
propose, joined to the apparent necessity which would then stare him
in the face, could not fail to produce all the effects which we
could desire.

To me this whole reasoning appeared fallacious.  Our business was
not to make him change appearances on this side of the water, but to
prepare him to give those which would be necessary on the other; and
there was no room to hope that if we could gain nothing on his
prejudices here, we should be able to overcome them in Britain.  I
would have argued just as the Duke of Ormond and Leslie if I had
been a Papist; and I saw well enough that some people about him, for
in a great dearth of ability there was cunning to be met with,
affected nothing more than to keep off all discourse of religion.
To my apprehension it was exceeding plain that we should find, if we
were once in England, the necessity of going forward at any rate
with him much greater than he would find that of complying with us.
I thought it an unpardonable fault to have taken a formal engagement
with him, when no previous satisfaction had been obtained on a point
at least as essential to our civil as to our religious rights; to
the peace of the State as to the prosperity of the Church; and I
looked on this fault to be aggravated by every day's delay.  Our
silence was unfair both to the Chevalier and to our friends in
England.  He was induced by it to believe that they would exact far
less from him than we knew they expected, and they were confirmed in
an opinion of his docility, which we knew to be void of all
foundation.  The pretence of removing that influence under which he
had lived was frivolous, and should never have been urged to me, who
saw plainly that, according to the measures pursued by the very
persons who urged it, he must be environed in England by the same
people that surrounded him here; and that the Court of St. James's
would be constituted, if ever he was restored, in the same manner as
that of St. Germains was.

When the draft of a declaration and other papers which were to be
dispersed in Great Britain came to be settled, it appeared that my
apprehension and distrust were but too well founded.  The Pretender
took exception against several passages, and particularly against
those wherein a direct promise of securing the Churches of England
and Ireland was made.  He was told, he said, that he could not in
conscience make such a promise, and, the debate being kept up a
little while, he asked me with some warmth why the Tories were so
desirous to have him if they expected those things from him which
his religion did not allow.  I left these drafts, by his order, with
him, that he might consider and amend them.  I cannot say that he
sent them to the Queen to be corrected by her confessor and the rest
of her council, but I firmly believe it.  Sure I am that he took
time sufficient to do this before he sent them from Bar, where he
then was, to Paris, whither I was returned.  When they were digested
in such a manner as satisfied his casuists he made them be printed,
and my name was put to the declaration, as if the original had been
signed by me.  I had hitherto submitted my opinion to the judgment
of others, but on this occasion I took advice from myself.  I
declared to him that I would not suffer my name to be at the bottom
of this paper.  All the copies which came to my hands I burnt, and
another was printed off without any countersigning.

The whole tenor of the amendments was one continued instance of the
grossest bigotry, and the most material passages were turned with
all the Jesuitical prevarication imaginable.  As much as it was his
interest at that time to cultivate the respect which many of the
Tories really had for the memory of the late Queen, and which many
others affected as a farther mark of their opposition to the Court
and to the Whig party; as much as it was his interest to weave the
honour of her name into his cause, and to render her, even after her
death, a party to the dispute, he could not be prevailed upon to
give her that character which her enemies allowed her, nor to make
use of those expressions, in speaking of her, which, by the general
manner of their application, are come to be little more than terms
of respect and words of form proper in the style of public acts.
For instance:-

She was called in the original draft "his sister of glorious and
blessed memory."  In that which he published, the epithet of
"blessed" was left out.  Her eminent justice and her exemplary piety
were occasionally mentioned; in lieu of which he substituted a flat,
and, in this case, an invidious expression, "her inclinations to
justice."

Not content with declaring her neither just nor pious in this world
he did little less than declare her damned in the other, according
to the charitable principles of the Church of Rome.

"When it pleased Almighty God to take her to Himself," was the
expression used in speaking of the death of the Queen.  This he
erased, and instead thereof inserted these words:  "When it pleased
Almighty God to put a period to her life."

He graciously allowed the Universities to be nurseries of loyalty;
but did not think that it became him to style them "nurseries of
religion."

Since his father passes already for a saint, and since reports are
encouraged of miracles which they suppose to be wrought at his tomb,
he might have allowed his grandfather to pass for a martyr; but he
struck out of the draft these words, "that blessed martyr who died
for his people," which were applied to King Charles I., and would
say nothing more of him than that "he fell a sacrifice to
rebellion."

In the clause which related to the Churches of England and Ireland
there was a plain and direct promise inserted of "effectual
provision for their security, and for their re-establishment in all
those rights which belong to them."  This clause was not suffered to
stand, but another was formed, wherein all mention of the Church of
Ireland was omitted, and nothing was promised to the Church of
England but the security, and "re-establishment of all those rights,
privileges, immunities, and possessions which belong to her," and
wherein he had already promised by his declaration of the 20th of
July, to secure and "protect all her members."

I need make no comment on a proceeding so easy to be understood.
The drift of these evasions, and of this affected obscurity, is
obvious enough--at least, it will appear so by the observations
which remain to be made.

He was so afraid of admitting any words which might be construed
into a promise of his consenting to those things which should be
found necessary for the present or future security of our
constitution, that in a paragraph where he was made to say that he
thought himself obliged to be solicitous for the prosperity of the
Church of England, the word prosperity was expunged, and we were
left by this mental reservation to guess what he was solicitous for.
It could not be for her prosperity:  that he had expunged.  It must
therefore be for her destruction, which in his language would have
been styled her conversion.

Another remarkable proof of the same kind is to be found towards the
conclusion of the declaration.  After having spoken of the peace and
flourishing estate of the kingdom, he was made to express his
readiness to concert with the two Houses such further measures as
should be thought necessary for securing the same to future
generations.  The design of this paragraph you see.  He and his
council saw it too, and therefore the word "securing" was laid
aside, and the word "leaving" was inserted in lieu of it.

One would imagine that a declaration corrected in this manner might
have been suffered to go abroad without any farther precaution.  But
these papers had been penned by Protestants; and who could answer
that there might not be still ground sufficient from the tenor of
them to insist on everything necessary for the security of that
religion?  The declaration of the 20th of July had been penned by a
priest of the Scotch college, and the expressions had been measured
so as to suit perfectly with the conduct which the Chevalier
intended to hold; so as to leave room to distinguish him, upon
future occasions, with the help of a little pious sophistry, out of
all the engagements which he seemed to take in it.  This orthodox
paper was therefore to accompany the heretical paper into the world,
and no promise of moment was to stand in the latter, unless
qualified by a reference to the former.  Thus the Church was to be
secured in the rights, etc., which belong to her.  How?  No
otherwise than according to the declaration of the month of July.
And what does that promise?  Security and protection to the members
of this Church in the enjoyment of their property.  I make no doubt
but Bellarmine, if he had been the Chevalier's confessor, would have
passed this paragraph thus amended.  No engagement whatever taken in
favour of the Church of Ireland, and a happy distinction found
between securing that of England, and protecting her members.  Many
a useful project for the destruction of heretics, and for
accumulating power and riches to the See of Rome, has been
established on a more slender foundation.

The same spirit reigns through the whole.  Civil and religious
rights are no otherwise to be confirmed than in conformity to the
declaration of July; nay, the general pardon is restrained and
limited to the terms prescribed therein.

This is the account which I judged too important to be omitted, and
which I chose to give you all together.  I shall surely be justified
at present in concluding that the Tories are grossly deluded in
their opinion of this Prince's character, or else that they
sacrifice all which ought to be esteemed precious and sacred among
men to their passions.  In both these cases I remain still a Tory,
and am true to the party.  In the first, I endeavour to undeceive
you by an experience purchased at my expense and for your sakes:  in
the second, I endeavour to prevail on you to revert to that
principle from which we have deviated.  You never intended, whilst I
lived amongst you, the ruin of your country; and yet every step
which you now make towards the restoration you are so fond of, is a
step towards this ruin.  No man of sense, well informed, can ever go
into measures for it, unless he thinks himself and his country in
such desperate circumstances that nothing is left them but to choose
of two ruins that which they like best.

The exile of the royal family, under Cromwell's usurpation, was the
principal cause of all those misfortunes in which Britain has been
involved, as well as of many of those which have happened to the
rest of Europe, during more than half a century.

The two brothers, Charles and James, became then infected with
Popery to such degrees as their different characters admitted of.
Charles had parts, and his good understanding served as an antidote
to repel the poison.  James, the simplest man of his time, drank off
the whole chalice.  The poison met in his composition with all the
fear, all the credulity, and all the obstinacy of temper proper to
increase its virulence and to strengthen its effect.  The first had
always a wrong bias upon him; he connived at the establishment, and
indirectly contributed to the growth, of that power which afterwards
disturbed the peace and threatened the liberty of Europe so often;
but he went no further out of the way.  The opposition of his
Parliaments and his own reflections stopped him here.  The Prince
and the people were, indeed, mutually jealous of one another, from
whence much present disorder flowed, and the foundation of future
evils was laid; but his good and his bad principles combating still
together, he maintained, during a reign of more than twenty years,
in some tolerable degree, the authority of the Crown and the
flourishing estate of the nation.  The last, drunk with
superstitious and even enthusiastic zeal, ran headlong into his own
ruin whilst he endeavoured to precipitate ours.  His Parliament and
his people did all they could to save themselves by winning him.
But all was vain; he had no principle on which they could take hold.
Even his good qualities worked against them, and his love of his
country went halves with his bigotry.  How he succeeded we have
heard from our fathers.  The revolution of 1688 saved the nation and
ruined the King.

Now the Pretender's education has rendered him infinitely less fit
than his uncle--and at least as unfit as his father--to be King of
Great Britain.  Add to this that there is no resource in his
understanding.  Men of the best sense find it hard to overcome
religious prejudices, which are of all the strongest; but he is a
slave to the weakest.  The rod hangs like the sword of Damocles over
his head, and he trembles before his mother and his priest.  What,
in the name of God, can any member of the Church of England promise
himself from such a character?  Are we by another revolution to
return into the same state from which we were delivered by the
first?  Let us take example from the Roman Catholics, who act very
reasonably in refusing to submit to a Protestant Prince.  Henry IV.
had at least as good a title to the crown of France as the Pretender
has to ours.  His religion alone stood in his way, and he had never
been King if he had not removed that obstacle.  Shall we submit to a
Popish Prince, who will no more imitate Henry IV. in changing his
religion than he will imitate those shining qualities which rendered
him the honestest gentleman, the bravest captain, and the greatest
prince of his age?  Allow me to give a loose to my pen for a moment
on this subject.  General benevolence and universal charity seem to
be established in the Gospel as the distinguishing badges of
Christianity.  How it happens I cannot tell; but so it is, that in
all ages of the Church the professors of Christianity seem to have
been animated by a quite contrary spirit.  Whilst they were thinly
scattered over the world, tolerated in some places, but established
nowhere, their zeal often consumed their charity.  Paganism, at that
time the religion by law established, was insulted by many of them;
the ceremonies were disturbed, the altars thrown down.  As soon as,
by the favour of Constantine, their numbers were increased, and the
reins of government were put into their hands, they began to employ
the secular arm, not only against different religions, but against
different sects which arose in their own religion.  A man may boldly
affirm that more blood has been shed in the disputes between
Christian and Christian than has ever been drawn from the whole body
of them in the persecutions of the heathen emperors and in the
conquests of the Mahometan princes.  From these they have received
quarter, but never from one another.  The Christian religion is
actually tolerated among the Mahometans, and the domes of churches
and mosques arise in the same city.  But it will be hard to find an
example where one sect of Christians has tolerated another which it
was in their power to extirpate.  They have gone farther in these
later ages; what was practised formerly has been taught since.
Persecution has been reduced into system, and the disciples of the
meek and humble Jesus have avowed a tyranny which the most barbarous
conquerors never claimed.  The wicked subtilty of casuists has
established breach of faith with those who differ from us as a duty
in opposition to faith, and murder itself has been made one of the
means of salvation.  I know very well that the Reformed Churches
have been far from going those cruel lengths which are authorised by
the doctrine as well as example of that of Rome, though Calvin put a
flaming sword on the title of a French edition of his Institute,
with this motto, "Je ne suis point venu mettre la paix, mais
l'epee;" but I know likewise that the difference lies in the means
and not in the aim of their policy.  The Church of England, the most
humane of all of them, would root out every other religion if it was
in her power.  She would not hang and burn; her measures would be
milder, and therefore, perhaps, more effectual.

Since, then, there is this inveterate rancour among Christians, can
anything be more absurd than for those of one persuasion to trust
the supreme power, or any part of it, to those of another?
Particularly must it not be reputed madness in those of our religion
to trust themselves in the hands of Roman Catholics?  Must it not be
reputed impudence in a Roman Catholic to expect that we should? he
who looks upon us as heretics, as men in rebellion against a lawful-
-nay, a divine--authority, and whom it is, therefore, meritorious by
all sorts of ways to reduce to obedience?  There are many, I know,
amongst them who think more generously, and whose morals are not
corrupted by that which is called religion; but this is the spirit
of the priesthood, in whose scale that scrap of a parable, "Compel
them to come in," which they apply as they please, outweighs the
whole Decalogue.  This will be the spirit of every man who is bigot
enough to be under their direction; and so much is sufficient for my
present purpose.

During your last Session of Parliament it was expected that the
Whigs would attempt to repeal the Occasional Bill.  The same
jealousy continues; there is, perhaps, foundation for it.  Give me
leave to ask you upon what principle we argued for making this law,
and upon what principle you must argue against the repeal of it.  I
have mentioned the principle in the beginning of this discourse.  No
man ought to be trusted with any share of power under a Government
who must, to act consistently with himself, endeavour the
destruction of that very Government.  Shall this proposition pass
for true when it is applied to keep a Presbyterian from being mayor
of a corporation, and shall it become false when it is applied to
keep a Papist from being king?  The proposition is equally true in
both cases; but the argument drawn from it is just so much stronger
in the latter than in the former case, as the mischiefs which may
result from the power and influence of a king are greater than those
which can be wrought by a magistrate of the lowest order.  This
seems to my apprehension to be argumentum ad hominem, and I do not
see by what happy distinction a Jacobite Tory could elude the force
of it.

It may be said, and it has been urged to me, that if the Chevalier
was restored, the knowledge of his character would be our security;
"habet foenum in cornu;" there would be no pretence for trusting
him, and by consequence it would be easy to put such restrictions on
the exercise of the regal power as might hinder him from invading or
sapping our religion and liberty.  But this I utterly deny.
Experience has shown us how ready men are to court power and profit,
and who can determine how far either the Tories or the Whigs would
comply, in order to secure to themselves the enjoyment of all the
places in the kingdom?  Suppose, however, that a majority of true
Israelites should be found, whom no temptation could oblige to bow
the knee to Baal; in order to preserve the Government on one hand
must they not destroy it on the other?  The necessary restrictions
would in this case be so many and so important as to leave hardly
the shadow of a monarchy if he submitted to them; and if he did not
submit to them, these patriots would have no resource left but in
rebellion.  Thus, therefore, the affair would turn if the Pretender
was restored.  We might, most probably, lose our religion and
liberty by the bigotry of the Prince and the corruption of the
people.  We should have no chance of preserving them but by an
entire change of the whole frame of our Government or by another
revolution.  What reasonable man would voluntarily reduce himself to
the necessity of making an option among such melancholy
alternatives?

The best which could be hoped for, were the Chevalier on the throne,
would be that a thread of favourable accidents, improved by the
wisdom and virtue of Parliament, might keep off the evil day during
his reign.  But still the fatal cause would be established; it would
be entailed upon us, and every man would be apprised that sooner or
later the fatal effect must follow.  Consider a little what a
condition we should be in, both with respect to our foreign interest
and our domestic quiet, whilst the reprieve lasted, whilst the
Chevalier or his successors made no direct attack upon the
constitution.

As to the first, it is true, indeed, that princes and States are
friends or foes to one another according as the motives of ambition
drive them.  These are the first principles of union and division
amongst them.  The Protestant Powers of Europe have joined, in our
days, to support and aggrandise the House of Austria, as they did in
the days of our forefathers to defeat her designs and to reduce her
power; and the most Christian King of France has more than once
joined his councils, and his arms too, with the councils and arms of
the most Mahometan Emperor of Constantinople.  But still there is,
and there must continue, as long as the influence of the Papal
authority subsists in Europe, another general, permanent, and
invariable division of interests.  The powers of earth, like those
of heaven, have two distinct motions.  Each of them rolls in his own
political orb, but each of them is hurried at the same time round
the great vortex of his religion.  If this general notion be just,
apply it to the present case.  Whilst a Roman Catholic holds the
rudder, how can we expect to be steered in our proper course?  His
political interest will certainly incline him to direct our first
motion right, but his mistaken religious interest will render him
incapable of doing it steadily.

As to the last, our domestic quiet; even whilst the Chevalier and
those of his race concealed their game, we should remain in the most
unhappy state which human nature is subject to, a state of doubt and
suspense.  Our preservation would depend on making him the object of
our eternal jealousy, who, to render himself and his people happy,
ought to be that of our entire confidence.

Whilst the Pretender and his successors forbore to attack the
religion and liberty of the nation, we should remain in the
condition of those people who labour under a broken constitution, or
who carry about them some chronical distemper.  They feel a little
pain at every moment; or a certain uneasiness, which is sometimes
less tolerable than pain, hangs continually on them, and they
languish in the constant expectation of dying perhaps in the
severest torture.

But if the fear of hell should dissipate all other fears in the
Pretender's mind, and carry him, which is frequently the effect of
that passion, to the most desperate undertakings; if among his
successors a man bold enough to make the attempt should arise, the
condition of the British nation would be still more deplorable.  The
attempt succeeding, we should fall into tyranny; for a change of
religion could never be brought about by consent; and the same force
that would be sufficient to enslave our consciences, would be
sufficient for all the other purposes of arbitrary power.  The
attempt failing, we should fall into anarchy; for there is no medium
when disputes between a prince and his people are arrived at a
certain point; he must either be submitted to or deposed.

I have now laid before you even more than I intended to have said
when I took my pen, and I am persuaded that if these papers ever
come to your hands, they will enable you to cast up the account
between party and me.  Till the time of the Queen's death it stands,
I believe, even between us.  The Tories distinguished me by their
approbation and by the credit which I had amongst them, and I
endeavoured to distinguish myself in their service, under the
immediate weight of great discouragement and with the not very
distant prospect of great danger.  Since that time the account is
not so even, and I dare appeal to any impartial person whether my
side in it be that of the debtor.  As to the opinion of mankind in
general, and the judgment which posterity will pass on these
matters, I am under no great concern.  "Suum cuique decus posteritas
rependit."



A LETTER TO ALEXANDER POPE



Dear Sir,--Since you have begun, at my request, the work which I
have wished long that you would undertake, it is but reasonable that
I submit to the task you impose upon me.  The mere compliance with
anything you desire, is a pleasure to me.  On the present occasion,
however, this compliance is a little interested; and that I may not
assume more merit with you than I really have, I will own that in
performing this act of friendship--for such you are willing to
esteem it--the purity of my motive is corrupted by some regard to my
private utility.  In short, I suspect you to be guilty of a very
friendly fraud, and to mean my service whilst you seem to mean your
own.

In leading me to discourse, as you have done often, and in pressing
me to write, as you do now, on certain subjects, you may propose to
draw me back to those trains of thought which are, above all others,
worthy to employ the human mind:  and I thank you for it.  They have
been often interrupted by the business and dissipations of the
world, but they were never so more grievously to me, nor less
usefully to the public, than since royal seduction prevailed on me
to abandon the quiet and leisure of the retreat I had chosen abroad,
and to neglect the example of Rutilius, for I might have imitated
him in this at least, who fled further from his country when he was
invited home.

You have begun your ethic epistles in a masterly manner.  You have
copied no other writer, nor will you, I think, be copied by any one.
It is with genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty
things that charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty,
has always something particular, something that belongs to itself
alone.  It is always distinguishable, not only from those who have
no claim to excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such
there are.

I am pleased, you may be sure, to find your satire turn, in the very
beginning of these epistles, against the principal cause--for such
you know that I think it--of all the errors, all the contradictions,
and all the disputes which have arisen among those who impose
themselves on their fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost
sole proprietors of a gift of God which is common to the whole
species.  This gift is reason; a faculty, or rather an aggregate of
faculties, that is bestowed in different degrees; and not in the
highest, certainly, on those who make the highest pretensions to it.
Let your satire chastise, and, if it be possible, humble that pride,
which is the fruitful parent of their vain curiosity and bold
presumption; which renders them dogmatical in the midst of
ignorance, and often sceptical in the midst of knowledge.  The man
who is puffed up with this philosophical pride, whether divine or
theist, or atheist, deserves no more to be respected than one of
those trifling creatures who are conscious of little else than their
animality, and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections
of their nature as the other attempts to go beyond them.  You will
discover as many silly affections, as much foppery and futility, as
much inconsistency and low artifice in one as in the other.  I never
met the mad woman at Brentford decked out in old and new rags, and
nice and fantastical in the manner of wearing them, without
reflecting on many of the profound scholars and sublime philosophers
of our own and of former ages.

You may expect some contradiction and some obloquy on the part of
these men, though you will have less to apprehend from their malice
and resentment than a writer in prose on the same subjects would
have.  You will be safer in the generalities of poetry; and I know
your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself in them
against any direct charge of heterodoxy.  But the great clamour of
all will be raised when you descend lower, and let your Muse loose
among the herd of mankind.  Then will those powers of dulness whom
you have ridiculed into immortality be called forth in one united
phalanx against you.  But why do I talk of what may happen?  You
have experienced lately something more than I prognosticate.  Fools
and knaves should be modest at least; they should ask quarter of men
of sense and virtue:  and so they do till they grow up to a
majority, till a similitude of character assures them of the
protection of the great.  But then vice and folly such as prevail in
our country, corrupt our manners, deform even social life, and
contribute to make us ridiculous as well as miserable, will claim
respect for the sake of the vicious and the foolish.  It will be
then no longer sufficient to spare persons; for to draw even
characters of imagination must become criminal when the application
of them to those of highest rank and greatest power cannot fail to
be made.  You began to laugh at the ridiculous taste or the no taste
in gardening and building of some men who are at great expense in
both.  What a clamour was raised instantly!  The name of Timon was
applied to a noble person with double malice, to make him
ridiculous, and you, who lived in friendship with him, odious.  By
the authority that employed itself to encourage this clamour, and by
the industry used to spread and support it, one would have thought
that you had directed your satire in that epistle to political
subjects, and had inveighed against those who impoverish, dishonour,
and sell their country, instead of making yourself inoffensively
merry at the expense of men who ruin none but themselves, and render
none but themselves ridiculous.  What will the clamour be, and how
will the same authority foment it, when you proceed to lash, in
other instances, our want of elegance even in luxury, and our wild
profusion, the source of insatiable rapacity, and almost universal
venality?  My mind forebodes that the time will come--and who knows
how near it may be?--when other powers than those of Grub Street may
be drawn forth against you, and when vice and folly may be avowedly
sheltered behind a power instituted for better and contrary
purposes--for the punishment of one, and for the reformation of
both.

But, however this may be, pursue your task undauntedly, and whilst
so many others convert the noblest employments of human society into
sordid trades, let the generous Muse resume her ancient dignity, re-
assert her ancient prerogative, and instruct and reform, as well as
amuse the world.  Let her give a new turn to the thoughts of men,
raise new affections in their minds, and determine in another and
better manner the passions of their hearts.  Poets, they say, were
the first philosophers and divines in every country, and in ours,
perhaps, the first institutions of religion and civil policy were
owing to our bards.  Their task might be hard, their merit was
certainly great.  But if they were to rise now from the dead they
would find the second task, if I mistake not, much harder than the
first, and confess it more easy to deal with ignorance than with
error.  When societies are once established and Governments formed,
men flatter themselves that they proceed in cultivating the first
rudiments of civility, policy, religion, and learning.  But they do
not observe that the private interests of many, the prejudices,
affections, and passions of all, have a large share in the work, and
often the largest.  These put a sort of bias on the mind, which
makes it decline from the straight course; and the further these
supposed improvements are carried, the greater this declination
grows, till men lose sight of primitive and real nature, and have no
other guide but custom, a second and a false nature.  The author of
one is divine wisdom; of the other, human imagination; and yet
whenever the second stands in opposition to the first, as it does
most frequently, the second prevails.  From hence it happens that
the most civilised nations are often guilty of injustice and cruelty
which the least civilised would abhor, and that many of the most
absurd opinions and doctrines which have been imposed in the Dark
Ages of ignorance continue to be the opinions and doctrines of ages
enlightened by philosophy and learning.  "If I was a philosopher,"
says Montaigne, "I would naturalise art instead of artilising
Nature."  The expression is odd, but the sense is good, and what he
recommends would be done if the reasons that have been given did not
stand in the way; if the self-interest of some men, the madness of
others, and the universal pride of the human heart did not determine
them to prefer error to truth and authority to reason.

Whilst your Muse is employed to lash the vicious into repentance, or
to laugh the fools of the age into shame, and whilst she rises
sometimes to the noblest subjects of philosophical meditation, I
shall throw upon paper, for your satisfaction and for my own, some
part at least of what I have thought and said formerly on the last
of these subjects, as well as the reflections that they may suggest
to me further in writing on them.  The strange situation I am in,
and the melancholy state of public affairs, take up much of my time;
divide, or even dissipate, my thoughts; and, which is worse, drag
the mind down by perpetual interruptions from a philosophical tone
or temper to the drudgery of private and public business.  The last
lies nearest my heart; and since I am once more engaged in the
service of my country, disarmed, gagged, and almost bound as I am, I
will not abandon it as long as the integrity and perseverance of
those who are under none of these disadvantages, and with whom I now
co-operate, make it reasonable for me to act the same part.  Further
than this no shadow of duty obliges me to go.  Plato ceased to act
for the Commonwealth when he ceased to persuade, and Solon laid down
his arms before the public magazine when Pisistratus grew too strong
to be opposed any longer with hopes of success.

Though my situation and my engagements are sufficiently known to
you, I choose to mention them on this occasion lest you should
expect from me anything more than I find myself able to perform
whilst I am in them.  It has been said by many that they wanted time
to make their discourses shorter; and if this be a good excuse, as I
think it may be often, I lay in my claim to it.  You must neither
expect in what I am about to write to you that brevity which might
be expected in letters or essays, nor that exactness of method, nor
that fulness of the several parts which they affect to observe who
presume to write philosophical treatises.  The merit of brevity is
relative to the manner and style in which any subject is treated, as
well as to the nature of it; for the same subject may be sometimes
treated very differently, and yet very properly, in both these
respects.  Should the poet make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a
long process of reasoning in the didactic style, he would be sure to
tire his reader on the whole, like Lucretius, though he reasoned
better than the Roman, and put into some parts of his work the same
poetical fire.  He may write, as you have begun to do, on
philosophical subjects, but he must write in his own character.  He
must contract, he may shadow, he has a right to omit whatever will
not be cast in the poetic mould; and when he cannot instruct, he may
hope to please.  But the philosopher has no such privileges.  He may
contract sometimes, he must never shadow.  He must be limited by his
matter, lest he should grow whimsical, and by the parts of it which
he understands best, lest he should grow obscure.  But these parts
he must develop fully, and he has no right to omit anything that may
serve the purpose of truth, whether it please or not.  As it would
be disingenuous to sacrifice truth to popularity, so it is trifling
to appeal to the reason and experience of mankind, as every
philosophical writer does, or must be understood to do, and then to
talk, like Plato and his ancient and modern disciples, to the
imagination only.  There is no need, however, to banish eloquence
out of philosophy, and truth and reason are no enemies to the purity
nor to the ornaments of language.  But as the want of an exact
determination of ideas and of an exact precision in the use of words
is inexcusable in a philosopher, he must preserve them, even at the
expense of style.  In short, it seems to me that the business of the
philosopher is to dilate, if I may borrow this word from Tully, to
press, to prove, to convince; and that of the poet to hint, to touch
his subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the affections,
and to speak to the heart.

Though I seem to prepare an apology for prolixity even in writing
essays, I will endeavour not to be tedious, and this endeavour may
succeed the better perhaps by declining any over-strict observation
of method.  There are certain points of that which I esteem the
first philosophy whereof I shall never lose sight, but this will be
very consistent with a sort of epistolary licence.  To digress and
to ramble are different things, and he who knows the country through
which he travels may venture out of the highroad, because he is sure
of finding his way back to it again.  Thus the several matters that
may arise even accidentally before me will have some share in
guiding my pen.

I dare not promise that the sections or members of these essays will
bear that nice proportion to one another and to the whole which a
severe critic would require.  All I dare promise you is that my
thoughts, in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to
you just as they pass through my mind, just as they use to be when
we converse together on these or any other subjects when we saunter
alone, or, as we have often done with good Arbuthnot and the jocose
Dean of St. Patrick's, among the multiplied scenes of your little
garden.  That theatre is large enough for my ambition.  I dare not
pretend to instruct mankind, and I am not humble enough to write to
the public for any other purpose.  I mean by writing on such
subjects as I intend here, to make some trial of my progress in
search of the most important truths, and to make this trial before a
friend in whom I think I may confide.  These epistolary essays,
therefore, will be written with as little regard to form and with as
little reserve as I used to show in the conversations which have
given occasion to them, when I maintained the same opinions and
insisted on the same reasons in defence of them.

It might seem strange to a man not well acquainted with the world,
and in particular with the philosophical and theological tribe, that
so much precaution should be necessary in the communication of our
thoughts on any subject of the first philosophy, which is of common
concern to the whole race of mankind, and wherein no one can have,
according to nature and truth, any separate interest.  Yet so it is.
The separate interests we cannot have by God's institutions, are
created by those of man; and there is no subject on which men deal
more unfairly with one another than this.  There are separate
interests, to mention them in general only, of prejudice and of
profession.  By the first, men set out in the search of truth under
the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations often to
such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they
have, the madder they grow.  By the second, they are sworn, as it
were, to follow all their lives the authority of some particular
school, to which "tanquam scopulo, adhaerescunt;" for the condition
of their engagement is to defend certain doctrines, and even mere
forms of speech, without examination, or to examine only in order to
defend them.  By both, they become philosophers as men became
Christians in the primitive Church, or as they determined themselves
about disputed doctrines; for says Hilarius, writing to St. Austin,
"Your holiness knows that the greatest part of the faithful embrace,
or refuse to embrace, a doctrine for no reason but the impression
which the name and authority of some body or other makes on them."
What now can a man who seeks truth for the sake of truth, and is
indifferent where he finds it, expect from any communication of his
thoughts to such men as these?  He will be much deceived if he
expects anything better than imposition or altercation.

Few men have, I believe, consulted others, both the living and the
dead, with less presumption, and in a greater spirit of docility,
than I have done:  and the more I have consulted, the less have I
found of that inward conviction on which a mind that is not
absolutely implicit can rest.  I thought for a time that this must
be my fault.  I distrusted myself, not my teachers--men of the
greatest name, ancient and modern.  But I found at last that it was
safer to trust myself than them, and to proceed by the light of my
own understanding than to wander after these ignes fatui of
philosophy.  If I am able therefore to tell you easily, and at the
same time so clearly and distinctly as to be easily understood, and
so strongly as not to be easily refuted, how I have thought for
myself, I shall be persuaded that I have thought enough on these
subjects.  If I am not able to do this, it will be evident that I
have not thought on them enough.  I must review my opinions,
discover and correct my errors.

I have said that the subjects I mean, and which will be the
principal objects of these essays, are those of the first
philosophy; and it is fit, therefore, that I should explain what I
understand by the first philosophy.  Do not imagine that I
understand what has passed commonly under that name--metaphysical
pneumatics, for instance, or ontology.  The first are conversant
about imaginary substances, such as may and may not exist.  That
there is a God we can demonstrate; and although we know nothing of
His manner of being, yet we acknowledge Him to be immaterial,
because a thousand absurdities, and such as imply the strongest
contradiction, result from the supposition that the Supreme Being is
a system of matter.  But of any other spirits we neither have nor
can have any knowledge:  and no man will be inquisitive about
spiritual physiognomy, nor go about to inquire, I believe, at this
time, as Evodius inquired of St. Austin, whether our immaterial
part, the soul, does not remain united, when it forsakes this gross
terrestrial body, to some ethereal body more subtile and more fine;
which was one of the Pythagorean and Platonic whimsies:  nor be
under any concern to know, if this be not the case of the dead, how
souls can be distinguished after their separation--that of Dives,
for example, from that of Lazarus.  The second--that is, ontology--
treats most scientifically of being abstracted from all being ("de
ente quatenus ens").  It came in fashion whilst Aristotle was in
fashion, and has been spun into an immense web out of scholastic
brains.  But it should be, and I think it is already, left to the
acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the
schools, and to other German wits.  Let them darken by tedious
definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their
vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible jargon,
which is supposed to express such abstractions as they cannot make,
and according to which, however, they presume often to control the
particular and most evident truths of experimental knowledge.  Such
reputed science deserves no rank in philosophy, not the last, and
much less the first.

I desire you not to imagine neither that I understand by the first
philosophy even such a science as my Lord Bacon describes--a science
of general observations and axioms, such as do not belong properly
to any particular part of science, but are common to many, "and of
an higher stage," as he expresses himself.  He complains that
philosophers have not gone up to the "spring-head," which would be
of "general and excellent use for the disclosing of Nature and the
abridgment of art," though they "draw now and then a bucket of water
out of the well for some particular use."  I respect--no man more--
this great authority; but I respect no authority enough to subscribe
on the faith of it, to that which appears to me fantastical, as if
it were real.  Now this spring-head of science is purely
fantastical, and the figure conveys a false notion to the mind, as
figures employed licentiously are apt to do.  The great author
himself calls these axioms, which are to constitute his first
philosophy, observations.  Such they are properly; for there are
some uniform principles, or uniform impressions of the same nature,
to be observed in very different subjects, "una eademque naturae
vestigia aut signacula diversis materiis et subjectis impressa."
These observations, therefore, when they are sufficiently verified
and well established, may be properly applied in discourse, or
writing, from one subject to another.  But I apprehend that when
they are so applied, they serve rather to illustrate a proposition
than to disclose Nature, or to abridge art.  They may have a better
foundation than similitudes and comparisons more loosely and more
superficially made.  They may compare realities, not appearances;
things that Nature has made alike, not things that seem only to have
some relation of this kind in our imaginations.  But still they are
comparisons of things distinct and independent.  They do not lead us
to things, but things that are lead us to make them.  He who
possesses two sciences, and the same will be often true of arts, may
find in certain respects a similitude between them because he
possesses both.  If he did not possess both, be would be led by
neither to the acquisition of the other.  Such observations are
effects, not means of knowledge; and, therefore, to suppose that any
collection of them can constitute a science of an "higher stage,"
from whence we may reason a priori down to particulars, is, I
presume, to suppose something very groundless, and very useless at
best, to the advancement of knowledge.  A pretended science of this
kind must be barren of knowledge, and may be fruitful of error, as
the Persian magic was, if it proceeded on the faint analogy that may
be discovered between physics and politics, and deduced the rules of
civil government from what the professors of it observed of the
operations and works of Nature in the material world.  The very
specimen of their magic which my Lord Bacon has given would be
sufficient to justify what is here objected to his doctrine.

Let us conclude this head by mentioning two examples among others
which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first
philosophy.  The first is this axiom, "If to unequals you add
equals, all will be unequal."  This, he says, is an axiom of justice
as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true
coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and
arithmetical and geometrical proportion.  But I would ask in my turn
whether the certainty that any arithmetician or geometrician has of
the arithmetical or geometrical truth will lead him to discover this
coincidence.  I ask whether the most profound lawyer who never heard
perhaps this axiom would be led to it by his notions of commutative
and distributive justice.  Certainly not.  He who is well skilled in
arithmetic or geometry, and in jurisprudence, may observe perhaps
this uniformity of natural principle or impression because he is so
skilled, though, to say the truth, it be not very obvious; but he
will not have derived his knowledge of it from any spring-head of a
first philosophy, from any science of an "higher stage" than
arithmetic, geometry, and jurisprudence.

The second example is this axiom, "That the destruction of things is
prevented by the reduction of them to their first principles."  This
rule is said to hold in religion, in physics, and in politics; and
Machiavel is quoted for having established it in the last of these.
Now though this axiom be generally, it is not universally, true;
and, to say nothing of physics, it will not be hard to produce, in
contradiction to it, examples of religious and civil institutions
that would have perished if they had been kept strictly to their
first principles, and that have been supported by departing more or
less from them.  It may seem justly matter of wonder that the author
of the "Advancement of Learning" should espouse this maxim in
religion and politics, as well as physics, so absolutely, and that
he should place it as an axiom of his first philosophy relatively to
the three, since he could not do it without falling into the abuse
he condemns so much in his "Organum Novum"--the abuse philosophers
are guilty of when they suffer the mind to rise too fast, as it is
apt to do, from particulars to remote and general axioms.  That the
author of the "Political Discourses" should fall into this abuse is
not at all strange.  The same abuse runs through all his writings,
in which, among many wise and many wicked reflections and precepts,
he establishes frequently general maxims or rules of conduct on a
few particular examples, and sometimes on a single example.  Upon
the whole matter, one of these axioms communicates no knowledge but
that which we must have before we can know the axiom, and the other
may betray us into great error when we apply it to use and action.
One is unprofitable, the other dangerous; and the philosophy which
admits them as principles of general knowledge deserves ill to be
reputed philosophy.  It would have been just as useful, and much
more safe, to admit into this receptacle of axioms those self-
evident and necessary truths alone of which we have an immediate
perception, since they are not confined to any special parts of
science, but are common to several, or to all.  Thus these
profitable axioms, "What is, is," "The whole is bigger than a part,"
and divers others, might serve to enlarge the spring-head of a first
philosophy, and be of excellent use in arguing ex proecognitis et
proeconcessis.

If you ask me now what I understand then by a first philosophy, my
answer will be such as I suppose you already prepared to receive.  I
understand by a first philosophy, that which deserves the first
place on account of the dignity and importance of its objects,
natural theology or theism, and natural religion or ethics.  If we
consider the order of the sciences in their rise and progress, the
first place belongs to natural philosophy, the mother of them all,
or the trunk, the tree of knowledge, out of which, and in proportion
to which, like so many branches, they all grow.  These branches
spread wide, and bear even fruits of different kinds.  But the sap
that made them shoot, and makes them flourish, rises from the root
through the trunk, and their productions are varied according to the
variety of strainers through which it flows.  In plain terms, I
speak not here of supernatural, or revealed science; and therefore I
say that all science, if it be real, must rise from below, and from
our own level.  It cannot descend from above, nor from superior
systems of being and knowledge.  Truth of existence is truth of
knowledge, and therefore reason searches after them in one of these
scenes, where both are to be found together, and are within our
reach; whilst imagination hopes fondly to find them in another,
where both of them are to be found, but surely not by us.  The
notices we receive from without concerning the beings that surround
us, and the inward consciousness we have of our own, are the
foundations, and the true criterions too, of all the knowledge we
acquire of body and of mind:  and body and mind are objects alike of
natural philosophy.  We assume commonly that they are two distinct
substances.  Be it so.  They are still united, and blended, as it
were, together, in one human nature:  and all natures, united or
not, fall within the province of natural philosophy.  On the
hypothesis indeed that body and soul are two distinct substances,
one of which subsists after the dissolution of the other, certain
men, who have taken the whimsical title of metaphysicians, as if
they had science beyond the bounds of Nature, or of Nature
discoverable by others, have taken likewise to themselves the
doctrine of mind; and have left that of body, under the name of
physics, to a supposed inferior order of philosophers.  But the
right of these stands good; for all the knowledge that can be
acquired about mind, or the unextended substance of the Cartesians,
must be acquired, like that about body, or the extended substance,
within the bounds of their province, and by the means they employ,
particular experiments and observations.  Nothing can be true of
mind, any more than of body, that is repugnant to these; and an
intellectual hypothesis which is not supported by the intellectual
phenomena is at least as ridiculous as a corporeal hypothesis which
is not supported by the corporeal phenomena.

If I have said thus much in this place concerning natural
philosophy, it has not been without good reason.  I consider
theology and ethics as the first of sciences in pre-eminence of
rank.  But I consider the constant contemplation of Nature--by which
I mean the whole system of God's works as far as it lies open to us-
-as the common spring of all sciences, and even of these.  What has
been said agreeably to this notion seems to me evidently true; and
yet metaphysical divines and philosophers proceed in direct
contradiction to it, and have thereby, if I mistake not, bewildered
themselves, and a great part of mankind, in such inextricable
labyrinths of hypothetical reasoning, that few men can find their
way back, and none can find it forward into the road of truth.  To
dwell long, and on some points always, in particular knowledge,
tires the patience of these impetuous philosophers.  They fly to
generals.  To consider attentively even the minutest phenomena of
body and mind mortifies their pride.  Rather than creep up slowly, a
posteriori, to a little general knowledge, they soar at once as far
and as high as imagination can carry them.  From thence they descend
again, armed with systems and arguments a priori; and, regardless
how these agree or clash with the phenomena of Nature, they impose
them on mankind.

It is this manner of philosophising, this preposterous method of
beginning our search after truth out of the bounds of human
knowledge, or of continuing it beyond them, that has corrupted
natural theology and natural religion in all ages.  They have been
corrupted to such a degree that it is grown, and was so long since,
as necessary to plead the cause of God, if I may use this expression
after Seneca, against the divine as against the atheist; to assert
his existence against the latter, to defend his attributes against
the former, and to justify his providence against both.  To both a
sincere and humble theist might say very properly, "I make no
difference between you on many occasions, because it is indifferent
whether you deny or defame the Supreme Being."  Nay, Plutarch,
though little orthodox in theology, was not in the wrong perhaps
when he declared the last to be the worst.

In treating the subjects about which I shall write to you in these
letters or essays, it will be therefore necessary to distinguish
genuine and pure theism from the unnatural and profane mixtures of
human imagination--what we can know of God from what we cannot know.
This is the more necessary, too, because, whilst true and false
notions about God and religion are blended together in our minds
under one specious name of science, the false are more likely to
make men doubt of the true, as it often happens, than to persuade
men that they are true themselves.  Now, in order to this purpose,
nothing can be more effectual than to go to the root of error, of
that primitive error which encourages our curiosity, sustains our
pride, fortifies our prejudices, and gives pretence to delusion.
This primitive error consists in the high opinion we are apt to
entertain of the human mind, though it holds, in truth, a very low
rank in the intellectual system.  To cure this error we need only
turn our eyes inward, and contemplate impartially what passes there
from the infancy to the maturity of the mind.  Thus it will not be
difficult, and thus alone it is possible, to discover the true
nature of human knowledge--how far it extends, how far it is real,
and where and how it begins to be fantastical.

Such an inquiry, if it cannot check the presumption nor humble the
pride of metaphysicians, may serve to undeceive others.  Locke
pursued it; he grounded all he taught on the phenomena of Nature; he
appealed to the experience and conscious knowledge of every one, and
rendered all he advanced intelligible.  Leibnitz, one of the vainest
and most chimerical men that ever got a name in philosophy, and who
is often so unintelligible that no man ought to believe he
understood himself, censured Locke as a superficial philosopher.
What has happened?  The philosophy of one has forced its way into
general approbation, that of the other has carried no conviction and
scarce any information to those who have misspent their time about
it.  To speak the truth, though it may seem a paradox, our knowledge
on many subjects, and particularly on those which we intend here,
must be superficial to be real.  This is the condition of humanity.
We are placed, as it were, in an intellectual twilight, where we
discover but few things clearly, and none entirely, and yet see just
enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and more
discoveries.  Thus flattered, men push their inquiries on, and may
be properly enough compared to Ixion, who "imagined he had Juno in
his arms whilst he embraced a cloud."

To be contented to know things as God has made us capable of knowing
them is, then, a first principle necessary to secure us from falling
into error; and if there is any subject upon which we should be most
on our guard against error, it is surely that which I have called
here the first philosophy.  God is hid from us in the majesty of His
nature, and the little we discover of Him must be discovered by the
light that is reflected from His works.  Out of this light,
therefore, we should never go in our inquiries and reasonings about
His nature, His attributes, and the order of His providence; and yet
upon these subjects men depart the furthest from it--nay, they who
depart the furthest are the best heard by the bulk of mankind.  The
less men know, the more they believe that they know.  Belief passes
in their minds for knowledge, and the very circumstances which
should beget doubt produce increase of faith.  Every glittering
apparition that is pointed out to them in the vast wild of
imagination passes for a reality; and the more distant, the more
confused, the more incomprehensible it is, the more sublime it is
esteemed.  He who should attempt to shift these scenes of airy
vision for those of real knowledge might expect to be treated with
scorn and anger by the whole theological and metaphysical tribe, the
masters and the scholars; he would be despised as a plebeian
philosopher, and railed at as an infidel.  It would be sounded high
that he debased human nature, which has a "cognation," so the
reverend and learned Doctor Cudworth calls it, with the divine; that
the soul of man, immaterial and immortal by its nature, was made to
contemplate higher and nobler objects than this sensible world, and
even than itself, since it was made to contemplate God and to be
united to Him.  In such clamour as this the voice of truth and of
reason would be drowned, and, with both of them on his side, he who
opposed it would make many enemies and few converts--nay, I am apt
to think that some of these, if he made any, would say to him, as
soon as the gaudy visions of error were dispelled, and till they
were accustomed to the simplicity of truth, "Pol me occidistis."
Prudence forbids me, therefore, to write as I think to the world,
whilst friendship forbids me to write otherwise to you.  I have been
a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in
philosophy.

But there is another consideration which deserves more regard,
because it is of a public nature, and because the common interests
of society may be affected by it.  Truth and falsehood, knowledge
and ignorance, revelations of the Creator, inventions of the
creature, dictates of reason, sallies of enthusiasm, have been
blended so long together in our systems of theology that it may be
thought dangerous to separate them, lest by attacking some parts of
these systems we should shake the whole.  It may be thought that
error itself deserves to be respected on this account, and that men
who are deluded for their good should be deluded on.

Some such reflections as these it is probable that Erasmus made when
he observed, in one of his letters to Melancthon, that Plato,
dreaming of a philosophical commonwealth, saw the impossibility of
governing the multitude without deceiving them.  "Let not Christians
lie," says this great divine:  "but let it not be thought neither
that every truth ought to be thrown out to the vulgar."  ("Non
expedit omnem veritatem prodere vulgo.")  Scaevola and Varro were
more explicit than Erasmus, and more reasonable than Plato.  They
held not only that many truths were to be concealed from the vulgar,
but that it was expedient the vulgar should believe many things that
were false.  They distinguished at the same time, very rightly,
between the regard due to religions already established, and the
conduct to be held in the establishment of them.  The Greek assumed
that men could not be governed by truth, and erected on this
principle a fabulous theology.  The Romans were not of the same
opinion.  Varro declared expressly that if he had been to frame a
new institution, he would have framed it "ex naturae potius
formula."  But they both thought that things evidently false might
deserve an outward respect when they are interwoven into a system of
government.  This outward respect every good citizen will show them
in such a case, and they can claim no more in any.  He will not
propagate these errors, but he will be cautious how he propagates
even truth in opposition to them.

There has been much noise made about free-thinking; and men have
been animated in the contest by a spirit that becomes neither the
character of divines nor that of good citizens, by an arbitrary
tyrannical spirit under the mask of religious zeal, and by a
presumptuous factious spirit under that of liberty.  If the first
could prevail, they would establish implicit belief and blind
obedience, and an Inquisition to maintain this abject servitude.  To
assert antipodes might become once more as heretical as Arianism or
Pelagianism; and men might be dragged to the jails of some Holy
Office, like Galilei, for saying they had seen what in fact they had
seen, and what every one else that pleased might see.  If the second
could prevail, they would destroy at once the general influence of
religion by shaking the foundations of it which education had laid.
These are wide extremes.  Is there no middle path in which a
reasonable man and a good citizen may direct his steps?  I think
there is.

Every one has an undoubted right to think freely--nay, it is the
duty of every one to do so as far as he has the necessary means and
opportunities.  This duty, too, is in no case so incumbent on him as
in those that regard what I call the first philosophy.  They who
have neither means nor opportunities of this sort must submit their
opinions to authority; and to what authority can they resign
themselves so properly and so safely as to that of the laws and
constitution of their country?  In general, nothing can be more
absurd than to take opinions of the greatest moment, and such as
concern us the most intimately, on trust; but there is no help
against it in many particular cases.  Things the most absurd in
speculation become necessary in practice.  Such is the human
constitution, and reason excuses them on the account of this
necessity.  Reason does even a little more, and it is all she can
do.  She gives the best direction possible to the absurdity.  Thus
she directs those who must believe because they cannot know, to
believe in the laws of their country, and conform their opinions and
practice to those of their ancestors, to those of Coruncanius, of
Scipio, of Scaevola--not to those of Zeno, of Cleanthes, of
Chrysippus.

But now the same reason that gives this direction to such men as
these will give a very contrary direction to those who have the
means and opportunities the others want.  Far from advising them to
submit to this mental bondage, she will advise them to employ their
whole industry to exert the utmost freedom of thought, and to rest
on no authority but hers--that is, their own.  She will speak to
them in the language of the Soufys, a sect of philosophers in Persia
that travellers have mentioned.  "Doubt," say these wise and honest
freethinkers, "is the key of knowledge.  He who never doubts, never
examines.  He who never examines, discovers nothing.  He who
discovers nothing, is blind and will remain so.  If you find no
reason to doubt concerning the opinions of your fathers, keep to
them; they will be sufficient for you.  If you find any reason to
doubt concerning them, seek the truth quietly, but take care not to
disturb the minds of other men."

Let us proceed agreeably to these maxims.  Let us seek truth, but
seek it quietly as well as freely.  Let us not imagine, like some
who are called freethinkers, that every man, who can think and judge
for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of
speaking, any more than of acting, according to the full freedom of
his thoughts.  The freedom belongs to him as a rational creature; he
lies under the restraint as a member of society.

If the religion we profess contained nothing more than articles of
faith and points of doctrine clearly revealed to us in the Gospel,
we might be obliged to renounce our natural freedom of thought in
favour of this supernatural authority.  But since it is notorious
that a certain order of men, who call themselves the Church, have
been employed to make and propagate a theological system of their
own, which they call Christianity, from the days of the Apostles,
and even from these days inclusively, it is our duty to examine and
analyse the whole, that we may distinguish what is divine from what
is human; adhere to the first implicitly, and ascribe to the last no
more authority than the word of man deserves.

Such an examination is the more necessary to be undertaken by every
one who is concerned for the truth of his religion and for the
honour of Christianity, because the first preachers of it were not,
and they who preach it still are not, agreed about many of the most
important points of their system; because the controversies raised
by these men have banished union, peace, and charity out of the
Christian world; and because some parts of the system savour so much
of superstition and enthusiasm that all the prejudices of education
and the whole weight of civil and ecclesiastical power can hardly
keep them in credit.  These considerations deserve the more
attention because nothing can be more true than what Plutarch said
of old, and my Lord Bacon has said since:  one, that superstition,
and the other, that vain controversies are principal causes of
atheism.

I neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the
present system of Christianity.  I should fear an attempt to alter
the established religion as much as they who have the most bigot
attachment to it, and for reasons as good as theirs, though not
entirely the same.  I speak only of the duty of every private man to
examine for himself, which would have an immediate good effect
relatively to himself, and might have in time a good effect
relatively to the public, since it would dispose the minds of men to
a greater indifference about theological disputes, which are the
disgrace of Christianity and have been the plagues of the world.

Will you tell me that private judgment must submit to the
established authority of Fathers and Councils?  My answer shall be
that the Fathers, ancient and modern, in Councils and out of them,
have raised that immense system of artificial theology by which
genuine Christianity is perverted and in which it is lost.  These
Fathers are fathers of the worst sort, such as contrive to keep
their children in a perpetual state of infancy, that they may
exercise perpetual and absolute dominion over them.  "Quo magis
regnum in illos exerceant pro sua libidine."  I call their theology
artificial, because it is in a multitude of instances conformable
neither to the religion of Nature nor to Gospel Christianity, but
often repugnant to both, though said to be founded on them.  I shall
have occasion to mention several such instances in the course of
these little essays.  Here I will only observe that if it be hard to
conceive how anything so absurd as the pagan theology stands
represented by the Fathers who wrote against it, and as it really
was, could ever gain credit among rational creatures, it is full as
hard to conceive how the artificial theology we speak of could ever
prevail, not only in ages of ignorance, but in the most enlightened.
There is a letter of St. Austin wherein he says that he was ashamed
of himself when he refuted the opinions of the former, and that he
was ashamed of mankind when he considered that such absurdities were
received and defended.  The reflections might be retorted on the
saint, since he broached and defended doctrines as unworthy of the
Supreme All-Perfect Being as those which the heathens taught
concerning their fictitious and inferior gods.  Is it necessary to
quote any other than that by which we are taught that God has
created numbers of men for no purpose but to damn them?  "Quisquis
praedestinationis doctrinam invidia gravat," says Calvin, "aperte
maledicit Deo."  Let us say, "Quisquis praedestinationis doctrinam
asserit, blasphemat".  Let us not impute such cruel injustice to the
all-perfect Being.  Let Austin and Calvin and all those who teach it
be answerable for it alone.  You may bring Fathers and Councils as
evidences in the cause of artificial theology, but reason must be
the judge; and all I contend for is, that she should be so in the
breast of every Christian that can appeal to her tribunal.

Will you tell me that even such a private examination of the
Christian system as I propose that every man who is able to make it
should make for himself, is unlawful; and that, if any doubts arise
in our minds concerning religion, we must have recourse for the
solution of them to some of that holy order which was instituted, by
God Himself, and which has been continued by the imposition of hands
in every Christian society, from the Apostles down to the present
clergy?  My answer shall be shortly this:  it is repugnant to all
the ideas of wisdom and goodness to believe that the universal terms
of salvation are knowable by the means of one order of men alone,
and that they continue to be so even after they have been published
to all nations.  Some of your directors will tell you that whilst
Christ was on earth the Apostles were the Church; that He was the
Bishop of it; that afterwards the admission of men into this order
was approved, and confirmed by visions and other divine
manifestations; and that these wonderful proofs of God's
interposition at the ordinations and consecrations of presbyters and
bishops lasted even in the time of St. Cyprian--that is, in the
middle of the third century.  It is pity that they lasted no longer,
for the honour of the Church, and for the conviction of those who do
not sufficiently reverence the religious society.  It were to be
wished, perhaps, that some of the secrets of electricity were
improved enough to be piously and usefully applied to this purpose.
If we beheld a shekinah, or divine presence, like the flame of a
taper, on the heads of those who receive the imposition of hands, we
might believe that they receive the Holy Ghost at the same time.
But as we have no reason to believe what superstitious, credulous,
or lying men (such as Cyprian himself was) reported formerly, that
they might establish the proud pretensions of the clergy, so we have
no reason to believe that five men of this order have any more of
the Divine Spirit in our time, after they are ordained, than they
had before.  It would be a farce to provoke laughter, if there was
no suspicion of profanation in it, to see them gravely lay hands on
one another, and bid one another receive the Holy Ghost.

Will you tell me finally, in opposition to what has been said, and
that you may anticipate what remains to be said, that laymen are not
only unauthorised, but quite unequal, without the assistance of
divines, to the task I propose?  If you do, I shall make no scruple
to tell you, in return, that laymen may be, if they please, in every
respect as fit, and are in one important respect more fit than
divines to go through this examination, and to judge for themselves
upon it.  We say that the Scriptures, concerning the divine
authenticity of which all the professors of Christianity agree, are
the sole criterion of Christianity.  You add tradition, concerning
which there may be, and there is, much dispute.  We have, then, a
certain invariable rule whenever the Scriptures speak plainly.
Whenever they do not speak so, we have this comfortable assurance--
that doctrines which nobody understands are revealed to nobody, and
are therefore improper objects of human inquiry.  We know, too, that
if we receive the explanations and commentaries of these dark
sayings from the clergy, we take the greatest part of our religion
from the word of man, not from the Word of God.  Tradition, indeed,
however derived, is not to be totally rejected; for if it was, how
came the canon of the Scriptures, even of the Gospels, to be fixed?
How was it conveyed down to us?  Traditions of general facts, and
general propositions plain and uniform, may be of some authority and
use.  But particular anecdotical traditions, whose original
authority is unknown, or justly suspicious, and that have acquired
only an appearance of generality and notoriety, because they have
been frequently and boldly repeated from age to age, deserve no more
regard than doctrines evidently added to the Scriptures, under
pretence of explaining and commenting them, by men as fallible as
ourselves.  We may receive the Scriptures, and be persuaded of their
authenticity, on the faith of ecclesiastical tradition; but it seems
to me that we may reject, at the same time, all the artificial
theology which has been raised on these Scriptures by doctors of the
Church, with as much right as they receive the Old Testament on the
authority of Jewish scribes and doctors whilst they reject the oral
law and all rabbinical literature.

He who examines on such principles as these, which are conformable
to truth and reason, may lay aside at once the immense volumes of
Fathers and Councils, of schoolmen, casuists, and controversial
writers, which have perplexed the world so long.  Natural religion
will be to such a man no longer intricate, revealed religion will be
no longer mysterious, nor the Word of God equivocal.  Clearness and
precision are two great excellences of human laws.  How much more
should we expect to find them in the law of God?  They have been
banished from thence by artificial theology, and he who is desirous
to find them must banish the professors of it from his councils,
instead of consulting them.  He must seek for genuine Christianity
with that simplicity of spirit with which it is taught in the Gospel
by Christ Himself.  He must do the very reverse of what has been
done by the persons you advise him to consult.

You see that I have said what has been said, on a supposition that,
however obscure theology may be, the Christian religion is extremely
plain, and requires no great learning nor deep meditation to develop
it.  But if it was not so plain, if both these were necessary to
develop it, is great learning the monopoly of the clergy since the
resurrection of letters, as a little learning was before that era?
Is deep meditation and justness of reasoning confined to men of that
order by a peculiar and exclusive privilege?  In short, and to ask a
question which experience will decide, have these men who boast that
they are appointed by God "to be the interpreters of His secret
will, to represent His person, and to answer in His name, as it
were, out of the sanctuary"--have these men, I say, been able in
more than seventeen centuries to establish an uniform system of
revealed religion--for natural religion never wanted their help
among the civil societies of Christians--or even in their own?  They
do not seem to have aimed at this desirable end.  Divided as they
have always been, they have always studied in order to believe, and
to take upon trust, or to find matter of discourse, or to contradict
and confute, but never to consider impartially nor to use a free
judgment.  On the contrary, they who have attempted to use this
freedom of judgment have been constantly and cruelly persecuted by
them.

The first steps towards the establishment of artificial theology,
which has passed for Christianity ever since, were enthusiastical.
They were not heretics alone who delighted in wild allegories and
the pompous jargon of mystery; they were the orthodox Fathers of the
first ages, they were the disciples of the Apostles, or the scholars
of their disciples; for the truth of which I may appeal to the
epistles and other writings of these men that are extant--to those
of Clemens, of Ignatius, or of Irenaeus, for instance--and to the
visions of Hermes, that have so near a resemblance to the
productions of Bunyan.

The next steps of the same kind were rhetorical.  They were made by
men who declaimed much and reasoned ill, but who imposed on the
imaginations of others by the heat of their own, by their
hyperboles, their exaggerations, the acrimony of their style, and
their violent invectives.  Such were the Chrysostoms, the Jeromes,
an Hilarius, a Cyril, and most of the Fathers.

The last of the steps I shall mention were logical, and these were
made very opportunely and very advantageously for the Church and for
artificial theology.  Absurdity in speculation and superstition in
practice had been cultivated so long, and were become so gross, that
men began to see through the veils that had been thrown over them,
as ignorant as those ages were.  Then the schoolmen arose.  I need
not display their character; it is enough known.  This only I will
say--that having very few materials of knowledge and much subtilty
of wit they wrought up systems of fancy on the little they knew, and
invented an art, by the help of Aristotle, not of enlarging, but of
puzzling, knowledge with technical terms, with definitions,
distinctions, and syllogisms merely verbal.  They taught what they
could not explain, evaded what they could not answer, and he who had
the most skill in this art might put to silence, when it came into
general use, the man who was consciously certain that he had truth
and reason on his side.

The authority of the schools lasted till the resurrection of
letters.  But as soon as real knowledge was enlarged, and the
conduct of the understanding better understood, it fell into
contempt.  The advocates of artificial theology have had since that
time a very hard task.  They have been obliged to defend in the
light what was imposed in the dark, and to acquire knowledge to
justify ignorance.  They were drawn to it with reluctance.  But
learning, that grew up among the laity, and controversies with one
another, made this unavoidable, which was not eligible on the
principles of ecclesiastical policy.  They have done with these new
arms all that great parts, great pains, and great zeal could do
under such disadvantages, and we may apply to this order, on this
occasion, "si Pergama dextra," etc.  But their Troy cannot be
defended; irreparable breaches have been made in it.  They have
improved in learning and knowledge, but this improvement has been
general, and as remarkable at least among the laity as among the
clergy.  Besides which it must be owned that the former have had in
this respect a sort of indirect obligation to the latter; for whilst
these men have searched into antiquity, have improved criticism, and
almost exhausted subtilty, they have furnished so many arms the more
to such of the others as do not submit implicitly to them, but
examine and judge for themselves.  By refuting one another, when
they differ, they have made it no hard matter to refute them all
when they agree.  And I believe there are few books written to
propagate or defend the received notions of artificial theology
which may not be refuted by the books themselves.  I conclude, on
the whole, that laymen have, or need to have, no want of the clergy
in examining and analysing the religion they profess.

But I said that they are in one important respect more fit to go
through this examination without the help of divines than with it.
A layman who seeks the truth may fall into error; but as he can have
no interest to deceive himself, so he has none of profession to bias
his private judgment, any more than to engage him to deceive others.
Now, the clergyman lies strongly under this influence in every
communion.  How, indeed, should it be otherwise?  Theology is become
one of those sciences which Seneca calls "scientiae in lucrum
exeuntes;" and sciences, like arts whose object is gain, are, in
good English, trades.  Such theology is, and men who could make no
fortune, except the lowest, in any other, make often the highest in
this; for the proof of which assertion I might produce some signal
instances among my lords the bishops.  The consequence has been
uniform; for how ready soever the tradesmen of one Church are to
expose the false wares--that is, the errors and abuses--of another,
they never admit that there are any in their own; and he who
admitted this in some particular instance would be driven out of the
ecclesiastical company as a false brother and one who spoiled the
trade.

Thus it comes to pass that new Churches may be established by the
dissensions, but that old ones cannot be reformed by the
concurrence, of the clergy.  There is no composition to be made with
this order of men.  He who does not believe all they teach in every
communion is reputed nearly as criminal as he who believes no part
of it.  He who cannot assent to the Athanasian Creed, of which
Archbishop Tillotson said, as I have heard, that he wished we were
well rid, would receive no better quarter than an atheist from the
generality of the clergy.  What recourse now has a man who cannot be
thus implicit?  Some have run into scepticism, some into atheism,
and, for fear of being imposed on by others, have imposed on
themselves.  The way to avoid these extremes is that which has been
chalked out in this introduction.  We may think freely without
thinking as licentiously as divines do when they raise a system of
imagination on true foundations, or as sceptics do when they
renounce all knowledge, or as atheists do when they attempt to
demolish the foundations of all religion and reject demonstration.
As we think for ourselves, we may keep our thoughts to ourselves, or
communicate them with a due reserve and in such a manner only as it
may be done without offending the laws of our country and disturbing
the public peace.

I cannot conclude my discourse on this occasion better than by
putting you in mind of a passage you quoted to me once, with great
applause, from a sermon of Foster, and to this effect:  "Where
mystery begins, religion ends."  The apophthegm pleased me much, and
I was glad to hear such a truth from any pulpit, since it shows an
inclination, at least, to purify Christianity from the leaven of
artificial theology, which consists principally in making things
that are very plain mysterious, and in pretending to make things
that are impenetrably mysterious very plain.  If you continue still
of the same mind, I shall have no excuse to make to you for what I
have written and shall write.  Our opinions coincide.  If you have
changed your mind, think again and examine further.  You will find
that it is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a
real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths.  One
follows Nature and Nature's God--that is, he follows God in His
works and in His Word; nor presumes to go further, by metaphysical
and theological commentaries of his own invention, than the two
texts, if I may use this expression, carry him very evidently.  They
who have done otherwise, and have affected to discover, by a
supposed science derived from tradition or taught in the schools,
more than they who have not such science can discover concerning the
nature, physical and moral, of the Supreme Being, and concerning the
secrets of His providence, have been either enthusiasts or knaves,
or else of that numerous tribe who reason well very often, but
reason always on some arbitrary supposition.

Much of this character belonged to the heathen divines, and it is in
all its parts peculiarly that of the ancient Fathers and modern
doctors of the Christian Church.  The former had reason, but no
revelation, to guide them; and though reason be always one, we
cannot wonder that different prejudices and different tempers of
imagination warped it in them on such subjects as these, and
produced all the extravagances of their theology.  The latter had
not the excuse of human frailty to make in mitigation of their
presumption.  On the contrary, the consideration of this frailty,
inseparable from their nature, aggravated their presumption.  They
had a much surer criterion than human reason; they had divine reason
and the Word of God to guide them and to limit their inquiries.  How
came they to go beyond this criterion?  Many of the first preachers
were led into it because they preached or wrote before there was any
such criterion established, in the acceptance of which they all
agreed, because they preached or wrote, in the meantime, on the
faith of tradition and on a confidence that they were persons
extraordinarily gifted.  Other reasons succeeded these.  Skill in
languages, not the gift of tongues, some knowledge of the Jewish
cabala and some of heathen philosophy, of Plato's especially, made
them presume to comment, and under that pretence to enlarge the
system of Christianity with as much licence as they could have taken
if the word of man, instead of the Word of God, had been concerned,
and they had commented the civil, not the divine, law.  They did
this so copiously that, to give one instance of it, the exposition
of St. Matthew's Gospel took up ninety homilies, and that of St.
John's eighty-seven, in the works of Chrysostom; which puts me in
mind of a Puritanical parson who, if I mistake not--for I have never
looked into the folio since I was a boy and condemned sometimes to
read in it--made one hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and
nineteenth Psalm.

Now all these men, both heathens and Christians, appeared gigantic
forms through the false medium of imagination and habitual
prejudice; but were, in truth, as arrant dwarfs in the knowledge to
which they pretended as you and I and all the sons of Adam.  The
former, however, deserved some excuse; the latter none.  The former
made a very ill use of their reason, no doubt, when they presume to
dogmatise about the divine nature, but they deceived nobody.  What
they taught, they taught on their own authority, which every other
man was at liberty to receive or reject as he approved or
disapproved the doctrine.  Christians, on the other hand, made a
very ill use of revelation and reason both.  Instead of employing
the superior principle to direct and confine the inferior, they
employed it to sanctify all that wild imagination, the passions, and
the interests of the ecclesiastical order suggested.  This abuse of
revelation was so scandalous that whilst they were building up a
system of religion under the name of Christianity, every one who
sought to signalise himself in the enterprise--and they were
multitudes--dragged the Scriptures to his opinion by different
interpretations, paraphrases, comments.  Arius and Nestorius both
pretended that they had it on their sides; Athanasius and Cyril on
theirs.  They rendered the Word of God so dubious that it ceased to
be a criterion, and they had recourse to another--to Councils and
the decrees of Councils.  He must be very ignorant in ecclesiastical
antiquity who does not know by what intrigues of the contending
factions--for such they were, and of the worst kind--these decrees
were obtained; and yet, an opinion prevailing that the Holy Ghost,
the same Divine Spirit who dictated the Scriptures, presided in
these assemblies and dictated their decrees, their decrees passed
for infallible decisions, and sanctified, little by little, much of
the superstition, the nonsense, and even the blasphemy which the
Fathers taught, and all the usurpations of the Church.  This opinion
prevailed and influenced the minds of men so powerfully and so long
that Erasmus, who owns in one of his letters that the writings of
OEcolampadius against transubstantiation seemed sufficient to seduce
even the elect ("ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi"), declares
in another that nothing hindered him from embracing the doctrine of
OEcolampadius but the consent of the Church to the other doctrine
("nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiae").  Thus artificial theology
rose on the demolitions, not on the foundations, of Christianity;
was incorporated into it; and became a principal part of it.  How
much it becomes a good Christian to distinguish them, in his private
thoughts at least, and how unfit even the greatest, the most
moderate, and the least ambitious of the ecclesiastical order are to
assist us in making this distinction, I have endeavoured to show you
by reason and by example.

It remains, then, that we apply ourselves to the study of the first
philosophy without any other guides than the works and the Word of
God.  In natural religion the clergy are unnecessary; in revealed
they are dangerous guides.





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