almost the single instance
of this prince's showing any disposition to forget injuries, as on
account of a delicacy and propriety in the wording of it, by no means
familiar to him.

Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, whom he appointed lord treasurer, was
in all respects calculated to be a fit instrument for the purposes then
in view. Besides being upon the worst terms with Halifax, in whom alone,
of all his ministers, James was likely to find any bias in favour of
popular principles, he was, both from prejudice of education, and from
interest, inasmuch as he had aspired to be the head of the Tories, a
great favourer of those servile principles of the Church of England which
had been lately so highly extolled from the throne. His near relation to
the Duchess of York might also be some recommendation, but his privity to
the late pecuniary transactions between the courts of Versailles and
London, and the cordiality with which he concurred in them, were by far
more powerful titles to his new master's confidence. For it must be
observed of this minister, as well as of many others of his party, that
his _high_ notions, as they are frequently styled, of power, regarded
only the relation between the king and his subjects, and not that in
which he might stand with respect to foreign princes; so that, provided
he could, by a dependence, however servile, upon Louis XIV., be placed
above the control of his parliament and people at home, he considered the
honour of the crown unsullied.

Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who was continued as secretary of
state, had been at one period a supporter of the exclusion bill, and had
been suspected of having offered the Duchess of Portsmouth to obtain the
succession to the crown for her son, the Duke of Richmond. Nay more,
King James, in his "Memoirs," charges him with having intended, just at
the time of Charles's death, to send him into a second banishment; but
with regard to this last point, it appears evident to me, that many
things in those "Memoirs," relative to this earl, were written after
James's abdication, and in the greatest bitterness of spirit, when he was
probably in a frame of mind to believe anything against a person by whom
he conceived himself to have been basely deserted. The reappointment,
therefore, of this nobleman to so important an office, is to be accounted
for partly upon the general principle above-mentioned, of making the new
reign a mere continuation of