There was need of no great sagacity to perceive how unequal such foundations were to the weight of the building designed to be raised on them. The Scots, with all their zeal and all their valour, could bring no revolution about unless in concurrence with the English; and among the latter nothing was ripe for such an undertaking but the temper of the people, if that was so. I thought, therefore, that the Pretender’s friends in the North should be kept from rising till those in the South had put themselves in a condition to act; and that in the meanwhile the utmost endeavours ought to be used with the King of France to espouse the cause; and that a plan of the design, with a more particular specification of the succours desired, as well as of the time when and the place to which they should be conveyed, ought to be written for;—all which I was told by the Marshal of Berwick, who had the principal direction at that time of these affairs in France, and I daresay very truly, had been often asked, but never sent. I looked on this enterprise to be of the nature of those which can hardly be undertaken more than once, and I judged that the success of it would depend on timing as near as possible together the insurrection in both parts of the island and the succours from hence. The Pretender approved this opinion of mine. He instructed me accordingly, and I left Lorraine after having accepted the Seals much against my inclination. I made one condition with him; it was this—that I should be at liberty to quit a station which my humour and many other considerations made me think myself very unfit for, whenever the occasion upon which I engaged was over, one way or other; and I desire you to remember that I did so. I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715. You will observe that all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for, was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and whither they should be sent. Here I found a multitude of people at work, and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination, no order, no concert. Persons concerned in the management of these affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case. It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now. The Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the present designs as infallible. Every meeting-house which the populace demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about, without him, in a very few weeks.