which threatened our persons and our party, I would have stifled my
private animosity and would have acted under him with as much zeal as
ever. But he was incapable of taking such a turn. The sum of all his
policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long
as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them. When it
became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the
end of his line.
By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the
intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had
endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.
The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution in
the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded, and by
the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of a new
administration. Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect to them and
to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be brought about
before he could effectually serve either. You cannot have forgot how
things which we pressed were put off upon every occasion till the peace;
the peace was to be the date of a new administration, and the period at
which the millenary year of Toryism should begin. Thus were the Tories
at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of
knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in
the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French
Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as
soon as the peace had rendered them practicable. He was to attempt
nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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