te the amount of the
minister's gains, if we put them at thirty thousand pounds a year: and
it must be remembered that fortunes of thirty thousand pounds a year
were in his time rarer than fortunes of a hundred thousand pounds a year
now are. It is probable that there was then not one peer of the realm
whose private income equalled Sunderland's official income.

What chance was there that, in a new order of things, a man so
deeply implicated in illegal and unpopular acts, a member of the High
Commission, a renegade whom the multitude, in places of general resort,
pursued with the cry of Popish dog, would be greater and richer? What
chance that he would even be able to escape condign punishment?

He had undoubtedly been long in the habit of looking forward to the time
when William and Mary might be, in the ordinary course of nature and
law, at the head of the English government, and had probably attempted
to make for himself an interest in their favour, by promises and
services which, if discovered, would not have raised his credit at
Whitehall. But it may with confidence be affirmed that he had no wish
to see them raised to power by a revolution, and that he did not at
all foresee such a revolution when, towards the close of June 1688, he
solemnly joined the communion of the Church of Rome.

Scarcely however had he, by that inexpiable crime, made himself an
object of hatred and contempt to the whole nation, when he learned
that the civil and ecclesiastical polity of England would shortly be
vindicated by foreign and domestic arms. From that moment all his plans
seem to have undergone a change. Fear bowed down his whole soul, and was
so written in his face that all who saw him could read. [461] It could
hardly be doubted that, if there were a revolution, the evil counsellors
who surrounded the throne would be called to a strict account: and among
those counsellors he stood in the foremost rank. The loss of his places,
his salaries, his pensions, was the least that he had to dread. His
patrimonial mansion amid woods at Althorpe might be confiscated. He
might lie many years in a prison. He might end his days in a foreign
land a pensioner on the bounty of France. Even this was not the worst.
Visions of an innumerable crowd covering Tower Hill and shouting with
savage joy at the sight of the apostate, of a scaffold hung with black,
of Burnet reading the prayer for the departing, and of Ketch leaning on
the axe with which R