Suddenly the bolt fell as if from the blue. Danby was warned by Sir John Reresby of danger impending from Montagu’s side. He had in vain attempted to manage the ambassador’s exclusion from Parliament; Montagu was defeated at Grinstead by the Treasurer’s candidate, and narrowly won a seat for Northampton on a contested election. Had he failed he could scarcely have dared fortune, but privilege of Parliament secured him from the enmity of the powers. Roused to immediate action, the minister attempted a counterstroke. Montagu had held unauthorised communication with the papal nuncio at Paris, and Danby charged him before the council with his malpractice, swiftly sending a warrant to seize his papers. But here the adroit statesman met more than his match. In the midst of the disturbance caused to the Commons by the king’s message on the subject, Montagu quietly remarked that he believed the search a design by abstracting evidence to conceal the misconduct of a great minister of which he had knowledge. He had in fact removed the documents from his other papers and placed them in safe keeping; and on the following day they were triumphantly produced to the House as evidence of Danby’s popery, treachery, and subservience to the interests of the King of France. For Montagu had been bought by Barillon and Shaftesbury, and promised Louis XIV for a hundred thousand crowns to procure the Treasurer’s ruin within six months. At a moment when all Protestants in the realm were crying in horror at the danger threatening their religion, the spectacle was exhibited of the king’s chief minister hurled from power by the French ambassador in conjunction with the leaders of the Protestant party for his too powerful support of the Protestant cause and the Anglican constitution. The man who had reorganised the royal finance, and had persistently advocated a national policy in the cause of English commerce and the English crown, vanished from the scene, accused of treachery to all three and under the stigma of having robbed his master and left twenty-two shillings and ten pence in an exchequer which, after payment for a vast addition to the navy, was actually stocked with over a hundred thousand pounds.[328] Charged with plotting, the Treasurer was himself the victim of a plot as base and planned by men as unscrupulous as are known to the annals of English politics. The rest of the story is thrice-told; how Danby was impeached and defended himself, pardoned and raised to a marquisate, how he lay hid in Whitehall while the bill of attainder was being passed, how he saved his head by surrendering four days before the attaint had force, and passed from the intrigues of the Popish Plot to an imprisonment of five years in the Tower, whence he was released in the day of his master’s triumph. Many years after, when Danby published his letters, he took occasion to prove himself no less unscrupulous than his enemies by judiciously altering