It is very probable, indeed it may be said to be certain, that the total value of these forfeitures was grossly exaggerated by the commissioners; it is possible that it was to some extent wilfully exaggerated for party purposes. The lands forfeited in Ireland during the Revolution may have been worth "nearer half a million sterling than two millions and a half." It does not seem to me, however, that this is a point of the importance which Macaulay seems to attach to it. Even if it could be shown that the proportion of the royal grants to the total forfeitures was unduly magnified through an over-estimate of the value of the former, I cannot see that it would affect the merits of the case. The real gist of the charge against William in respect of these grants--assuming, that is to say, that he was justified in making them at all without the sanction of Parliament--is to be sought not in a comparison of the royal benefactions with the amount of the property at his disposal, but in an examination of their proportions _inter se_. Even if it be shown that he distributed property of the value not of a million sterling, but of only a fifth of that sum, it remains equally true in either case, that more than one-tenth of his bounty went to a single favourite who had little or no public services to show for them, and very nearly an eighth to a young man whose only claim upon him was that of being an able and faithful servant's eldest son. The grants to Albemarle and Woodstock are impossible to defend, and the latter almost impossible to explain. William had already loaded Portland with benefits, and to the vast estates he had bestowed upon him in England his eldest son would, in the natural course of events, succeed. On what ground, either of justice or even of sentiment, it could have been thought well to enrich the expectant heir of so much English landed property with 135,820 acres of forfeited Irish land is a mystery which has never been satisfactorily explained. As to the grant to Albemarle, it was of even worse example. Woodstock was at least the son of a counsellor to whom William owed much, and whom he might conceivably have regarded himself as rewarding in the person of his heir; but what had Keppel, a mere favourite, a young courtier with no other recommendations but his youth, his good looks, and his complaisance, a personality too closely recalling that of a "minion" of Henri Trois, and which in the Jacobite libels, not wisely to be thus supplied with colourable pretexts for their calumnies, was openly so described--what, one cannot but ask, had Keppel done to deserve a grant of 106,633 acres of the forfeited Irish land? Compare these two largesses, Woodstock's and Albemarle's, with those bestowed on Lord Romney, an ex-Secretary of State, and one of the leaders of the movement which brought William to England; on Lord Athlone, the stout Dutch soldier who, as General Ginkel, had given and taken many a hard knock in his master's service;