What facilitated the enterprises of the French was the extreme ignorance in which the English Court had kept themselves of the affairs of America. That department is subjected to the Secretary of State for the Southern Province, assisted by the Board of Trade. That Board, during Sir Robert Walpole’s administration, had very faultily been suffered to lapse almost into a sinecure; and during all that period the Duke of Newcastle had been Secretary of State. It would not be credited what reams of papers, representations, memorials, petitions, from that quarter of the world lay mouldering and unopened in his office. West Indian Governors could not come within the sphere of his jealousy: nothing else merited or could fix his mercurial inattention. He knew as little of the geography of his province as of the state of it: when General Legonier hinted some defence to him for Annapolis, he replied with his evasive lisping hurry, “Annapolis, Annapolis! oh! yes, Annapolis must be defended; to be sure, Annapolis should be defended--where is Annapolis?” When the French invasions forced him to arouse a little from this lethargy, he struggled to preserve his inactivity, by ordering letters of the most abject and submissive import to be written to our Governors, who pressed for instructions, nay, for permission to defend themselves. Somewhat more of this will appear hereafter. But if he sacrificed the dignity of the Crown with one hand, he thought to exalt it with the other: the prerogative was strained unwarrantably over the Assemblies: the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborn, a new Governor of New York, seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal, than for a free rich British Settlement, and in such opulence and of such haughtiness, that suspicions had long[244] been conceived of their meditating to throw off their dependence on their mother country.