Nothing can be severer in the fate of a man than to act so between two parties, that both sides should be provoked against him. It is certain, the jacobites cursed those tracts and the author, and when they came to read them, being deluded by the titles according to the design, they threw them by with the greatest indignation imaginable. Had the pretender ever come to the throne, I could have expected nothing but death, and all the ignominy and reproach that the most inveterate enemy of his person and claim could be supposed to suffer. On the other hand, I leave it to any considering man to judge, what a surprise it must be to me to meet with all the public clamour that informers could invent, as being guilty of writing against the Hanover succession, and as having written several pamphlets in favour of the pretender. No man in this nation ever had a more rivetted aversion to the pretender, and to all the family he pretended to come of, than I; a man that had been in arms under the duke of Monmouth, against the cruelty and arbitrary government of his pretended father; that for twenty years had to my utmost opposed him (king James) and his party after his abdication; and had served king William to his satisfaction, and the friends of the revolution after his death, at all hazards and upon all occasions; that had suffered and been ruined under the administration of high-fliers and jacobites, of whom some at this day counterfeit whigs. It could not be! The nature of the thing could by no means allow it; it must be monstrous; and that the wonder may cease, I shall take leave to quote some of the expressions out of these books, of which the worst enemy I have in the world is left to judge whether they are in favour of the pretender or no; but of this in its place. For these books I was prosecuted, taken into custody, and obliged to give 800_l._ bail. I do not in the least object here against, or design to reflect upon, the proceedings of the judges which were subsequent to this. I acknowledged then, and now acknowledge again, that upon the information given, there was a sufficient ground for all they did; and my unhappy entering upon my own vindication in print, while the case was before their lordships in a judicial way, was an error which I did not understand, and which I did not foresee; and therefore, although I had great reason to reflect upon the informers, yet I was wrong in making that defence in the manner and time I then made it; and which when I found, I made no scruple afterwards to petition the judges, and acknowledge they had just ground to resent it. Upon which petition and acknowledgment their lordships were pleased, with particular marks of goodness, to release me, and not to take the advantage of an error of ignorance, as if it had been considered and premeditated.