d with the way in which the financial business
had lately been done: but the office of Lord Treasurer was of such high
importance that, in general, it ought not to be entrusted to a single
person, and could not safely be entrusted by a Roman Catholic King to a
person zealous for the Church of England. "Think better of it, my Lord,"
he continued. "Read again the papers from my brother's box. I will give
you a little more time for consideration, if you desire it." Rochester
saw that all was over, and that the wisest course left to him was to
make his retreat with as much money and as much credit as possible. He
succeeded in both objects. He obtained a pension of four thousand pounds
a year for two lives on the post office. He had made great sums out of
the estates of traitors, and carried with him in particular Grey's bond
for forty thousand pounds, and a grant of all the estate which the
crown had in Grey's extensive property. [201] No person had ever quitted
office on terms so advantageous. To the applause of the sincere friends
of the Established Church Rochester had, indeed, very slender claims.
To save his place he had sate in that tribunal which had been illegally
created for the purpose of persecuting her. To save his place he had
given a dishonest vote for degrading one of her most eminent ministers,
had affected to doubt her orthodoxy, had listened with the outward show
of docility to teachers who called her schismatical and heretical, and
had offered to cooperate strenuously with her deadliest enemies in their
designs against her. The highest praise to which he was entitled was
this, that he had shrunk from the exceeding wickedness and baseness of
publicly abjuring, for lucre, the religion in which he had been brought
up, which he believed to be true, and of which he had long made an
ostentatious profession. Yet he was extolled by the great body of
Churchmen as if he had been the bravest and purest of martyrs. The
Old and New Testaments, the Martyrologies of Eusebius and of Fox, were
ransacked to find parallels for his heroic piety. He was Daniel in the
den of lions, Shadrach in the fiery furnace, Peter in the dungeon of
Herod, Paul at the bar of Nero, Ignatius in the amphitheatre, Latimer at
the stake. Among the many facts which prove that the standard of honour
and virtue among the public men of that age was low, the admiration
excited by Rochester's constancy is, perhaps, the most decisive.

In his fall he dra