take advantage of the confusion caused by the South Sea Scheme, by the death of Stanhope, which was supposed to have broken the link with France, and by the new election for Parliament, was brought to Walpole's knowledge. The Regent had been asked to supply 5000 men, but Dubois was not likely to overthrow the diplomatic edifice he had so carefully built up. He at once informed the English minister at Paris. And at the opening of the new Parliament George was able to give a short summary of the conspiracy, involving an expedition headed by James and Ormond from Spain and Italy, the seizure of the Tower, the Bank and the Exchequer, and the declaration in London of King James; and at the same time he could state that some of the chiefs, especially the Bishop of Rochester, were already under arrest. [Sidenote: Failure of the conspiracy.] [Sidenote: Quarrel between Carteret and Walpole.] The superiority of the Whig party was now shown in the Bills that were passed relative to this conspiracy. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended for a whole year, the longest time on record; sums were granted for an increase of the army; a tax of £100,000, to be collected from all Nonjurors, was enacted; and as the evidence was scarcely sufficient to go before a Court of Law, Bills of Pains and Penalties were introduced against some of the subordinate agents, and against Atterbury himself, who was forced to leave the kingdom. At Calais he met Bolingbroke, who had just received his pardon and was returning to England. He had been dismissed by the Pretender after the failure of 1715, and had vowed never again to serve so ungrateful a master. None the less did he continue for the rest of his life to hamper by his intrigues the Whig party. The chief cause of his irritation was that his overtures were rejected by Walpole, who already began to show that thirst for power and jealousy of men of great talents which was one of his marked characteristics, and which was the ultimate cause of his fall. Carteret, who with Townshend was now Secretary of State, was his first victim--a man of the most brilliant parts and of unrivalled knowledge of foreign affairs. He had succeeded to much of the influence as well as to the views of Stanhope. Abroad he was inclined to plunge England into the complications of Hanoverian policy. It was in fact natural that with his great knowledge of foreign affairs he should be led to consider them more important than other English statesmen, who then as now were inclined towards a policy of isolation. At home, too, his views were less exclusively those of a Whig partisan than those of his fellow ministers. He feared probably less than the occasion demanded the strength of the Jacobites. He looked upon the sole possession of power by the Whigs on the Hanoverian succession as a necessary but only temporary evil. He was desirous of a far larger admission of the Tory element, and would willingly have admitted Bolingbroke and those Tories