Majesty's
royal uncles, had betrayed the liberties of the people, and had abjured
the Protestant religion.

Sunderland had been uneasy from the first moment at which his name
had been mentioned in the House of Commons. He was now in an agony
of terror. The whole enigma of his life, an enigma of which many
unsatisfactory and some absurd explanations have been propounded, is at
once solved if we consider him as a man insatiably greedy of wealth and
power, and yet nervously apprehensive of danger. He rushed with ravenous
eagerness at every bait which was offered to his cupidity. But any
ominous shadow, any threatening murmur, sufficed to stop him in his full
career, and to make him change his course or bury himself in a hiding
place. He ought to have thought himself fortunate indeed, when, after
all the crimes which he had committed, he found himself again enjoying
his picture gallery and his woods at Althorpe, sitting in the House of
Lords, admitted to the royal closet, pensioned from the Privy Purse,
consulted about the most important affairs of state. But his ambition
and avarice would not suffer him to rest till he held a high and
lucrative office, till he was a regent of the kingdom. The consequence
was, as might have been expected, a violent clamour; and that clamour he
had not the spirit to face.

His friends assured him that the threatened address would not be
carried. Perhaps a hundred and sixty members might vote for it; but
hardly more. "A hundred and sixty!" he cried: "No minister can stand
against a hundred and sixty. I am sure that I will not try." It must be
remembered that a hundred and sixty votes in a House of five hundred and
thirteen members would correspond to more than two hundred votes in the
present House of Commons; a very formidable minority on the unfavourable
side of a question deeply affecting the personal character of a public
man. William, unwilling to part with a servant whom he knew to be
unprincipled, but whom he did not consider as more unprincipled than
many other English politicians, and in whom he had found much of a very
useful sort of knowledge, and of a very useful sort of ability, tried to
induce the ministry to come to the rescue. It was particularly
important to soothe Wharton, who had been exasperated by his recent
disappointment, and had probably exasperated the other members of the
junto. He was sent for to the palace. The King himself intreated him
to be reconciled to the