To the question ‘Did Lord OXFORD, during his tenure of office, conspire to enthrone the Pretender?’ it ought always to have been a sufficient answer that there was, as yet, not a tittle of _evidence_ of any such conspiracy on his part. That accusation had never any support beyond surmise and conjecture. Men who were in possession of every imaginable resource and appliance to back their search failed to adduce even a shadow of evidence in proof of the charge they would fain have fastened upon him. And in 1869 the matter still stands, in the main, where it stood in 1717. After many examinations of the most secret correspondence of the Stuarts and their adherents, and after the publishing of extensive selections from it—made at intervals which spread over eighty years,—not a scrap of direct and valid testimony has been found to sustain the charge. Every passage, save one, which bears at all on OXFORD’S intercourse with Jacobite emissaries, up to the year 1715, tends to show that what they asserted about his intentions on the Pretender’s behalf was built on wishes, hopes, and guesses—on anything rather than knowledge. Every passage, save one, tends to show that he was using the Jacobites for his own purposes, without the least idea of aiding theirs. Every passage, save one, is in entire harmony with the terms of that incompatible charge by means of which BOLINGBROKE justified to himself his life-long hostility, when writing the _Letter to Sir William Wyndham_. The significance of that charge, coming from such a source, can scarcely be exaggerated. ‘OXFORD would not,’ wrote BOLINGBROKE, ‘or he could not, act with us, and he resolved that we should not act without him, as long as he could hinder it.... At the Queen’s death, he hoped ... 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. [Sidenote: Bolingbroke, _Letter to Sir W. Wyndham_.] 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.’ [Sidenote: Gautier to De Torcy; 14 December, 1713. [Printed in _Edinb. Review_, from the Notes of Sir James Mackintosh, in vol. lxii, pp. 18, seqq.]] The solitary passage in the correspondence of the Jacobite agents which goes directly to the issue is the assertion made by GAUTIER, in a letter to DE TORCY, that OXFORD said to him, in December, 1713, ‘As long as I live, England shall not be governed by a German.’ In that notable statement lies the pith of a mass of letters which report the hopes, beliefs, conjectures, and imaginings, of their respective writers, as to what Lord OXFORD would do for the Pretender,—whenever that prince could be brought to change, or, at least, to disguise his religion.