appeared in the House of Lords, and took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, his old companions in arms, the Grenadier Guards, firing a _feu-de-joie_ on the auspicious occasion. "That day effaced the traces of years of injustice. The death of a single individual"--the weak, ungrateful, vacillating Anne--"had restored the patriotic hero to the position in which he stood after the battle of Blenheim!" Though he had resolved to take part no more in the conduct of affairs, he was prevailed upon to resume his post of commander-in-chief, in which great capacity his new sovereign received him with extraordinary demonstrations of satisfaction, "proud to do honour to the chief _under whom he himself had gained his first honours on the field of Oudenarde_!"[43] The discomfited Jacobites, Bolingbroke, Ormond, and Oxford, were impeached for high treason, for their conduct in seeking to overturn the Act of Settlement, and restore the Stuarts. The former two fled to France, but Oxford remained, and was prosecuted, but acquitted. Here again the character of Marlborough has been malefied, by the charge of having done all in his power to thwart the prosecution, for fear of Lord Oxford's revealing the correspondence of the Duke in early life, after the Revolution. This slander, however, is decisively refuted by two facts--that the Duke _voted in every stage of the prosecution_! and by the still more decisive fact, that he was found to have been specially exempted from the proffered amnesty published by the Pretender when he landed in Scotland.[44] This last event--the Rebellion in Scotland--must have been indeed, as Mr Alison remarks, a sore trial to Marlborough--"more severe than any he had experienced since James II. had been precipitated from the throne; for here was the son of his early patron and benefactor asserting, in arms, his right to the throne of his fathers!" But the Duke was here true as steel to his principles; and his energy and sagacity extinguished the formidable insurrection, and with it the hopes of the Stuarts. The Pretender returned humbled and ruined to the Continent, in time to witness the death of the monarch Louis XIV., whose guilty ambition had lighted the terrible conflagration, of which a spark had been thus kindled in this country, and which he had lived to see extinguished by such torrents of blood. He was then seventy-seven years of age, miserable in contemplating the wide-spread misery and ruin which he had prostituted all his greatness in order to effect, and shuddering at the recollection of his share in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His death-bed reflections and injunctions to his successor we have already laid before the reader.[45] [42] ALISON, ii. 263, note. [43] _Ibid._ p. 266. [44] _Ibid._ p. 303. [45] _Ante_, p. 146.