The only adverse event during the remaining portion of William’s reign, which particularly affected Lord and Lady Marlborough, was the conspiracy of Sir John Fenwick, one of the most active Jacobites of the day. With this party, though not personally with Fenwick, Marlborough, it cannot be denied, had been deeply and culpably implicated. No considerations can excuse the dishonourable intercourse which Marlborough, in conjunction with Godolphin and others, had carried on with the exiled monarch. It resulted from a temporising and mean policy, which sought to secure an indemnity from James in case of his restoration, or of the accession of the Prince of Wales. If the reasons which engaged Marlborough to aid the accession of William were valid, and sprang from a pure source, those reasons were still in force to promote the peaceable rule of the reigning monarch, and to support him on his throne. The rash encouragement which Godolphin and Marlborough had given to James’s emissaries, now involved them in a serious dilemma. Fenwick, convicted, upon the evidence of an intercepted letter to his wife, of being concerned in the plot formed at this time to assassinate William, sought to avert the justly merited sentence from which he afterwards suffered, by a disclosure of the names of those whom he declared to have been concerned in the conspiracy. He was instructed in the details of his pretended confessions, by Lord Monmouth, afterwards the noted and eccentric Earl of Peterborough. He accused the Duke of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Marlborough, Godolphin, and Russell, of treasonable practices; and of having, in particular, accepted pardons from the late King.