Under these circumstances, there were, even in the British cabinet, not a few who regretted, and even repented, the part which had been so recently enacted in the late settlement of the crown. The dissolution of the Parliament, or Convention as it was called, irritated these discontents; a secret correspondence was held, even from the very centre of the court, with the monarch at St. Germains; the Duke of Bolton, the Marquis of Winchester, the Earls of Devonshire and Montagu, the Marquis of Carmarthen, one of the principal abettors of the Revolution, were all more or less implicated in the conspiracy. At this critical period, the fidelity, the honour, and the prudence of Marlborough, sank beneath the powerful temptation of avenging upon William the slights which he had suffered, and of raising his own fortunes by restoring the Stuart dynasty. Historians have been at a loss to comprehend the motives of one who had so recently sacrificed all private considerations to what he justly deemed imperative necessity.[240] Ambition, and, in the mind of Marlborough its too frequent attendant, the love of gain, sufficiently account for his defection from William, who, prejudiced, as the Duchess asserts,[241] by Bentinck, availed himself of the services of Marlborough in war, but was little disposed to recompense his toils by appointment to lucrative civil offices. Whatever might be the motives of Marlborough’s culpable correspondence with the exiled King, the fact itself was not long concealed from William, who was cruelly compelled to employ many to whose dissimulation he was not a stranger; whilst James was equally unable to rely on the assurances of those whose perfidy to another did not augur the most perfect fidelity to his own cause.[242] All classes in society were now, however, more or less infected with Jacobitism. Those who were dissatisfied with the treatment of the British court were secretly addressed by the agents of James, whilst the lower classes were stimulated by means of the press, which formerly had published many libels against the Duke of York, but which were now loud in his favour.[243] It was not long before this conspiracy, the first of the many ineffectual attempts which were made to restore James, began to assume the distinct and fearful form of a threatened invasion.