behalf, to change the fundamental order of succession to the Crown.[108] Nothing indeed can more forcibly paint the desperation of the popish faction than their entertainment of so preposterous a scheme. But it naturally increased the solicitude of William about the intrigues of the English cabinet. It does not appear that any direct overtures were made to the Prince of Orange, except by a very few malcontents, till the embassy of Dykvelt from the States in the spring of 1687. It was William's object to ascertain, through that minister, the real state of parties in England. Such assurances as he carried back to Holland gave encouragement to an enterprise that would have been equally injudicious and unwarrantable without them.[109] Danby, Halifax, Nottingham, and others of the tory, as well as whig factions, entered into a secret correspondence with the Prince of Orange; some from a real attachment to the constitutional limitations of monarchy; some from a conviction that, without open apostasy from the protestant faith, they could never obtain from James the prizes of their ambition. This must have been the predominant motive with Lord Churchill, who never gave any proof of solicitude about civil liberty; and his influence taught the Princess Anne to distinguish her interest from those of her father. It was about this time also that even Sunderland entered upon a mysterious communication with the Prince of Orange; but whether he afterwards served his present master only to betray him, as has been generally believed, or sought rather to propitiate, by clandestine professions, one who might in the course of events become such, is not perhaps what the evidence already known to the world will enable us to determine.[110] The apologists of James have often represented Sunderland's treachery as extending back to the commencement of this reign, as if he had entered upon the king's service with no other aim than to put him on measures that would naturally lead to his ruin. But the simpler hypothesis is probably nearer the truth: a corrupt and artful statesman could have no better prospect for his own advantage than the power and popularity of a government which he administered; it was a conviction of the king's incorrigible and infatuated adherence to designs which the rising spirit of the nation rendered utterly infeasible, an apprehension that, whenever a free parliament should be called, he might experience the fate of Strafford as an expiation for the sins of the Crown, which determined him to secure as far as possible his own indemnity upon a revolution that he could not have withstood.[111]