and continued their efforts on his behalf with indefatigable pertinacity. There is still extant a letter in which Lord Conway describes how, in 1668, he lingered in London after the adjournment of Parliament on purpose to get an opportunity of speaking to Lord Arlington about him. The Secretary of State hesitated: to attach to himself, partly by services and partly by hopes, the greatest possible number of adherents was Arlington’s constant aim; but what if Mr. Solicitor-General should enlist his brother in the hostile camp of the fallen Chancellor Clarendon? Conway overcame these apprehensions by bringing about a personal interview between the Secretary and the Solicitor, who assured his Lordship that Sir John would be his Lordship’s faithful retainer. Arlington, satisfied, promised to recall Sir John from Florence and to recommend him to the King for preferment in connexion with foreign affairs. This arrangement Conway thought much better than bargaining for a reversion of some lucrative Court office--a boon perhaps more tempting, but less certain. As to fitness, he assured his brother-in-law that he would have no competition to fear: “You will have the advantage of coming into a Court where there is not one man of ability.” The King, “destitute of counsel, is jealous of all men that speak to him of business.” All that was really needed was a good word from Lord Arlington, “for though Lord Arlington labours with all art imaginable not to be thought a Premier Minister, yet he is either so, or a favourite, for he is the sole guide that the King relies upon.”[9] And so, after five years of eminently undistinguished and discontented sojourn at Florence, Sir John returned home, in August 1670, served for two years on the “Councell for matters relating to Our Forreigne Colonies and Plantations,” and then, the ideal office still failing to present itself, he had, after all, to accept the Embassy he abhorred. He set out in May 1673. His frame of mind on leaving England can be seen from the note by which he bade Lord Conway farewell: “This is the third time I have left my Native Soyl,” he wrote. “If God Almighty make me so happy as to return once more to your Lordship, I shall then thinke it is time to fix at home and leave of (_sic_) all thoughts of further wandering. But [if] my life by its period abroad putts one to my Travell I beseech your Lordship to believe that you have lost the most faythfull and zealous servant the World yet was ever possessed of....”[10]