the Succession of the House of Hanover.

Nothing can be more plain than that the titles of these books were
amusements, in order to put the books into the hands of those people
whom the jacobites had deluded, and to bring them to be read by them.

Previous to what I shall further say of these books, I must observe that
all these books met with so general a reception and approbation among
those who were most sincere for the protestant succession, that they
sent them all over the kingdom, and recommended them to the people as
excellent and useful pieces; insomuch that about seven editions of them
were printed, and they were reprinted in other places. And I do protest,
had his present majesty, then elector of Hanover, given me a thousand
pounds to have written for the interest of his succession, and to expose
and render the interest of the pretender odious and ridiculous, I could
have done nothing more effectual to those purposes than these books
were.

And that I may make my worst enemies, to whom this is a fair appeal,
judges of this, I must take leave, by and by, to repeat some of the
expressions in these books, which were direct and need no explanation,
which I think no man that was in the interest of the pretender, nay,
which no man but one who was entirely in the interest of the Hanover
succession, could write.

Nothing can be severer in the fate of a man than to act so between two
parties, that both sides should be provoked against him. It is certain,
the jacobites cursed those tracts and the author, and when they came to
read them, being deluded by the titles according to the design, they
threw them by with the greatest indignation imaginable. Had the
pretender ever come to the throne, I could have expected nothing but
death, and all the ignominy and reproach that the most inveterate enemy
of his person and claim could be supposed to suffer.

On the other hand, I leave it to any considering man to judge, what a
surprise it must be to me to meet with all the public clamour that
informers could invent, as being guilty of writing against the Hanover
succession, and as having written several pamphlets in favour of the
pretender.

No man in this nation ever had a more rivetted aversion to the
pretender, and to all the family he pretended to come of, than I; a man
that had been in arms under the duke of Monmouth, against the cruelty
and arbitrary government of his pretended father; that for twenty years
had to my