d by extraordinary means, he had
resigned the powers which he had during two years exercised in defiance
of law, and had hastened to make his peace with his clerical brethren.
He had in the Convention voted for a Regency; but he had taken the oaths
without hesitation; he had borne a conspicuous part in the coronation of
the new Sovereigns; and by his skilful hand had been added to the Form
of Prayer used on the fifth of November those sentences in which the
Church expresses her gratitude for the second great deliverance wrought
on that day. [280] Such a man, possessed of a plentiful income, of a
seat in the House of Lords, of one agreeable house among the elms
of Bromley, and of another in the cloisters of Westminster, was very
unlikely to run the risk of martyrdom. He was not, indeed, on perfectly
good terms with the government. For the feeling which, next to
solicitude for his own comfort and repose, seems to have had the
greatest influence on his public conduct, was his dislike of
the Puritans; a dislike which sprang, not from bigotry, but from
Epicureanism. Their austerity was a reproach to his slothful and
luxurious life; their phraseology shocked his fastidious taste; and,
where they were concerned, his ordinary good nature forsook him.
Loathing the nonconformists as he did, he was not likely to be
very zealous for a prince whom the nonconformists regarded as their
protector. But Sprat's faults afforded ample security that he would
never, from spleen against William, engage in any plot to bring back
James. Why Young should have assigned the most perilous part in an
enterprise full of peril to a man singularly pliant, cautious and
selfindulgent, it is difficult to say.

The first step which the ministers took was to send Marlborough to the
Tower. He was by far the most formidable of all the accused persons; and
that he had held a traitorous correspondence with Saint Germains was a
fact which, whether Young were perjured or not, the Queen and her chief
advisers knew to be true. One of the Clerks of the Council and several
messengers were sent down to Bromley with a warrant from Nottingham.
Sprat was taken into custody. All the apartments in which it could
reasonably be supposed that he would have hidden an important document
were searched, the library, the diningroom, the drawingroom, the
bedchamber, and the adjacent closets. His papers were strictly examined.
Much food prose was found, and probably some bad verse,