When the draft of a declaration and other papers which were to be dispersed in Great Britain came to be settled, it appeared that my apprehension and distrust were but too well founded. The Pretender took exception against several passages, and particularly against those wherein a direct promise of securing the Churches of England and Ireland was made. He was told, he said, that he could not in conscience make such a promise, and, the debate being kept up a little while, he asked me with some warmth why the Tories were so desirous to have him if they expected those things from him which his religion did not allow. I left these drafts, by his order, with him, that he might consider and amend them. I cannot say that he sent them to the Queen to be corrected by her confessor and the rest of her council, but I firmly believe it. Sure I am that he took time sufficient to do this before he sent them from Bar, where he then was, to Paris, whither I was returned. When they were digested in such a manner as satisfied his casuists he made them be printed, and my name was put to the declaration, as if the original had been signed by me. I had hitherto submitted my opinion to the judgment of others, but on this occasion I took advice from myself. I declared to him that I would not suffer my name to be at the bottom of this paper. All the copies which came to my hands I burnt, and another was printed off without any countersigning. The whole tenor of the amendments was one continued instance of the grossest bigotry, and the most material passages were turned with all the Jesuitical prevarication imaginable. As much as it was his interest at that time to cultivate the respect which many of the Tories really had for the memory of the late Queen, and which many others affected as a farther mark of their opposition to the Court and to the Whig party; as much as it was his interest to weave the honour of her name into his cause, and to render her, even after her death, a party to the dispute, he could not be prevailed upon to give her that character which her enemies allowed her, nor to make use of those expressions, in speaking of her, which, by the general manner of their application, are come to be little more than terms of respect and words of form proper in the style of public acts. For instance:— She was called in the original draft “his sister of glorious and blessed memory.” In that which he published, the epithet of “blessed” was left out. Her eminent justice and her exemplary piety were occasionally mentioned; in lieu of which he substituted a flat, and, in this case, an invidious expression, “her inclinations to justice.” Not content with declaring her neither just nor pious in this world he did little less than declare her damned in the other, according to the charitable principles of the Church of Rome.