he sailed, he should determine by whom the
government should be administered during his absence. Hitherto Mary had
acted as his vicegerent when he was out of England; but she was gone.
He therefore delegated his authority to seven Lords Justices, Tenison,
Archbishop of Canterbury, Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal, Pembroke,
Keeper of the Privy Seal, Devonshire, Lord Steward, Dorset, Lord
Chamberlain, Shrewsbury, Secretary of State, and Godolphin, First
Commissioner of the Treasury. It is easy to judge from this list of
names which way the balance of power was now leaning. Godolphin alone
of the seven was a Tory. The Lord President, still second in rank, and
a few days before first in power, of the great lay dignitaries of the
realm, was passed over; and the omission was universally regarded as an
official announcement of his disgrace. [586]

There were some who wondered that the Princess of Denmark was not
appointed Regent. The reconciliation, which had been begun while
Mary was dying, had since her death been, in external show at least,
completed. This was one of those occasions on which Sunderland was
peculiarly qualified to be useful. He was admirably fitted to manage a
personal negotiation, to soften resentment, to soothe wounded pride, to
select, among all the objects of human desire, the very bait which
was most likely to allure the mind with which he was dealing. On this
occasion his task was not difficult. He had two excellent assistants,
Marlborough in the household of Anne, and Somers in the cabinet of
William.

Marlborough was now as desirous to support the government as he had once
been to subvert it. The death of Mary had produced a complete change in
all his schemes. There was one event to which he looked forward with
the most intense longing, the accession of the Princess to the English
throne. It was certain that, on the day on which she began to reign, he
would be in her Court all that Buckingham had been in the Court of James
the First. Marlborough too must have been conscious of powers of a very
different order from those which Buckingham had possessed, of a genius
for politics not inferior to that of Richelieu, of a genius for war not
inferior to that of Turenne. Perhaps the disgraced General, in obscurity
and inaction, anticipated the day when his power to help and hurt in
Europe would be equal to that of her mightiest princes, when he would be
servilely flattered and courted by Caesar on one side