t is difficult to overrate either
the wickedness or the utility. To him chiefly it was owing that, at the
most critical moment in our history, a French army was not menacing the
Batavian frontier and a French fleet hovering about the English coast.
William could not, without staining his own honour, refuse to protect
one whom he had not scrupled to employ. Yet it was no easy task even for
William to save that guilty head from the first outbreak of public fury.
For even those extreme politicians of both sides who agreed in nothing
else agreed in calling for vengeance on the renegade. The Whigs hated
him as the vilest of the slaves by whom the late government had been
served, and the Jacobites as the vilest of the traitors by whom it had
been overthrown. Had he remained in England, he would probably have died
by the hand of the executioner, if indeed the executioner had not
been anticipated by the populace. But in Holland a political refugee,
favoured by the Stadtholder, might hope to live unmolested. To Holland
Sunderland fled, disguised, it is said, as a woman; and his wife
accompanied him. At Rotterdam, a town devoted to the House of Orange, he
thought himself secure. But the magistrates were not in all the secrets
of the Prince, and were assured by some busy Englishmen that His
Highness would be delighted to hear of the arrest of the Popish dog, the
Judas, whose appearance on Tower Hill was impatiently expected by all
London. Sunderland was thrown into prison, and remained there till
an order for his release arrived from Whitehall. He then proceeded to
Amsterdam, and there changed his religion again. His second apostasy
edified his wife as much as his first apostasy had edified his master.
The Countess wrote to assure her pious friends in England that her poor
dear lord's heart had at last been really touched by divine grace, and
that, in spite of all her afflictions, she was comforted by seeing him
so true a convert. We may, however, without any violation of Christian
charity, suspect that he was still the same false, callous, Sunderland
who, a few months before, had made Bonrepaux shudder by denying the
existence of a God, and had, at the same time, won the heart of James
by pretending to believe in transubstantiation. In a short time the
banished man put forth an apology for his conduct. This apology, when
examined, will be found to amount merely to a confession that he had
committed one series of crimes in order to