"You may judge of my astonishment," His Majesty wrote, "at his effrontery in accusing you. You are, I trust, too fully convinced of the entire confidence which I place in you to think that such stories can make any impression on me. You will observe this honest man's sincerity, who only accuses those in my service, and not one of his own party." It will be understood that that in His Majesty's letter which touched my lord home was less the magnanimity displayed in it than the remembrance that once before the Sovereign had dealt with the subject in the same spirit, and that now the world must know this. Of the immediate accusation, with all its details of time and circumstance, he thought little, believing, not only that the truth must quickly sweep it away, but that in the meantime few would be found so credulous as to put faith in it. But he saw with painful clearness that the charge would rub the old sore and gall the old raw; and he winced, seated alone in his library in the silence of the house, as if the iron already seared the living flesh. With throes of shame he foresaw what staunch Whigs, such as Somers and Wharton, would say of him; what the _Postboy_ and the _Courant_ would print of him; what the rank and file of the party--exposed to no danger in the event of a Restoration, and consequently to few temptations to make their peace abroad--would think of their trusted leader, when they learned the truth. On Marlborough and Russell, Godolphin and Sunderland, the breath of suspicion had blown: on him never, and he had held his head high. How could he meet them now? How could he face them? Nay, if that were all, how, he asked himself, could he face the honest Nonjuror? Or the honest Jacobite? Or the honest Tory? He, who had taken the oaths to the new government and broken them, who had set up the new government and deceived it, who had dubbed himself patriot--_cui bono?_ Presently brooding over it, he came to think that there was but one man in England, _turpissimus_; that it would be better in the day of reckoning for the meanest carted pickpocket, whose sentence came before him for revision, than for the King's Secretary in his garter and robes!