After the fall of Clarendon, which soon followed, the king entered into that career of misgovernment which, that he was able to pursue it to its end, is a disgrace to the history of our country. If anything can add to our disgust at the meanness with which he solicited a dependence upon Louis XIV., it is, the hypocritical pretence upon which he was continually pressing that monarch. After having passed a law, making it penal to affirm (what was true) that he was a papist, he pretended (which was certainly not true) to be a zealous and bigoted papist; and the uneasiness of his conscience at so long delaying a public avowal of his conversion, was more than once urged by him as an argument to increase the pension, and to accelerate the assistance, he was to receive from France. In a later period of his reign, when his interest, as he thought, lay the other way, that he might at once continue to earn his wages, and yet put off a public conversion, he stated some scruples, contracted, no doubt, by his affection to the Protestant churches, in relation to the popish mode of giving the sacrament, and pretended a wish that the pope might be induced by Louis to consider of some alterations in that respect, to enable him to reconcile himself to the Roman church with a clear and pure conscience. The ministry known by the name of the Cabal seems to have consisted of characters so unprincipled, as justly to deserve the severity with which they have been treated by all writers who have mentioned them; but if it is probable that they were ready to betray their king, as well as their country, it is certain that the king betrayed them, keeping from them the real state of his connexion with France, and from some of them, at least, the secret of what he was pleased to call his religion. Whether this concealment on his part arose from his habitual treachery, and from the incapacity which men of that character feel of being open and honest, even when they know it is their interest to be so, or from an apprehension that they might demand for themselves some share of the French money, which he was unwilling to give them, cannot now be determined. But to the want of genuine and reciprocal confidence between him and those ministers is to be attributed, in a great measure, the escape which the nation at that time experienced--an escape, however, which proved to be only a reprieve from that servitude to which they were afterwards reduced in the latter years of the reign.