In this state of confusion and distress, to which he had reduced himself and us, you remember the part he acted. He was the spy of the Whigs, and voted with us in the morning against those very questions which he had penned the night before with Walpole and others. He kept his post on terms which no man but he would have held it on, neither submitting to the Queen, nor complying with his friends. He would not, or he could not, act with us; and he resolved that we should not act without him as long as he could hinder it. The Queen’s health was very precarious, and at her death he hoped by these means to deliver us up, bound as it were hand and foot, to our adversaries. On the foundation of this merit he flattered himself that he had gained some of the Whigs, and softened at least the rest of the party to him. By his secret negotiations at Hanover, he took it for granted that he was not only reconciled to that Court, but that he should, under his present Majesty’s reign, have as much credit as he had enjoyed under that of the Queen. He was weak enough to boast of this, and to promise his good offices voluntarily to several: for no man was weak enough to think them worth being solicited. In a word, you must have heard that he answered to Lord Dartmouth and to Mr. Bromley, that one should keep the Privy Seal, and the other the seals of Secretary; and that Lord Cowper makes no scruple of telling how he came to offer him the seals of Chancellor. When the King arrived, he went to Greenwich with an affectation of pomp and of favour. Against his suspicious character, he was once in his life the bubble of his credulity; and this delusion betrayed him into a punishment more severe in my sense than all which has happened to him since, or than perpetual exile; he was affronted in the manner in which he was presented to the King. The meanest subject would have been received with goodness, the most obnoxious with an air of indifference; but he was received with the most distinguishing contempt. This treatment he had in the face of the nation. The King began his reign, in this instance, with punishing the ingratitude, the perfidy, the insolence, which had been shown to his predecessor. Oxford fled from Court covered with shame, the object of the derision of the Whigs and of the indignation of the Tories.