Louis the Fourteenth refused to give open assistance to the cause of the Stuarts, but he was willing enough to lend any help that he could in private to Bolingbroke and to them. His death was the first severe blow to the cause which Bolingbroke now represented. Louis the Fourteenth was, according to Bolingbroke himself, the best friend James then had. "When I engaged," says Bolingbroke, "in this business, my principal dependence was on his personal character; my hopes sank as he declined, and died when he expired." The Regent, Duke of Orleans, was a man who, with all his coarse and unrestricted dissipation, had some political capacity and even statesmanship. He saw that the Stuart was a sinking, the Hanoverian a rising cause. Even when the two seemed {118} most nearly balanced it yet appeared to Orleans, if we may quote a phrase more often used in our days than in his, that the one cause was only half alive, but the other was half dead. Orleans, moreover, had a good deal of that feeling which was more strongly marked still in a Duke of Orleans of a later day. He had a liking for England and for English ways; he was, indeed, rather inclined to affect the political manners of an English statesman. He therefore leaned to the side of the Government established in England; and, at the urgent request of the English Ambassador in Paris, he acted with some energy in preventing the sailing of vessels intended for the uses of an expedition to the English coast. [Sidenote: 1715--"Mischief, thou art afoot."] James Stuart seemed as if he were determined still further to imperil the chances of his family, and to embarrass his adherents. The right moment for a movement in his favor had been allowed to pass away, and now, with characteristic blundering and ill fortune, he seized upon the most unsuitable time that could possibly have been employed for such an attempt. Something might have been done, perhaps, a temporary alteration in the dynasty might have been obtained, if energy and decision had been shown in that momentous interval when Queen Anne lay dying. But when that time had been allowed to pass, the clear policy of the Pretender was to permit the fears of Englishmen to go to sleep for a while, to endeavor to reorganize his plans and his party; to wait until a certain reaction should set in, a reaction very likely to come about because of the apparent incapacity and the unattractive character of George the First, and then at some timely hour, with well-matured preparations, to strike an energetic blow. George the First was only a year on the throne when the adherents of James got up a miserable attempt at an insurrection.