prosecutions were carried on at Westminster with the utmost violence, and
the ferment among the people was risen to such a degree that it could end
in nothing better—it might have ended in something worse—than it did.
The measures which I observed at Paris had turned to no account; on the
contrary, the letter which I wrote to Mr. Secretary Stanhope was quoted
as a base and fawning submission, and what I intended as a mark of
respect to the Government and a service to my friends was perverted to
ruin me in the opinion of the latter. The Act of Attainder, in
consequence of my impeachment, had passed against me for crimes of the
blackest dye; and among other inducements to pass it, my having been
engaged in the Pretender’s interest was one. How well founded this
Article was has already appeared; I was just as guilty of the rest. The
correspondence with me was, you know, neither frequent nor safe. I heard
seldom and darkly from you, and though I saw well enough which way the
current ran, yet I was entirely ignorant of the measures you took, and of
the use you intended to make of me. I contented myself, therefore, with
letting you all know that you had but to command me, and that I was ready
to venture in your service the little which remained, as frankly as I had
exposed all which was gone. At last your commands came, and I shall show
you in what manner I executed them.
The person who was sent to me arrived in the beginning of July, 1715, at
the place where I was. He spoke in the name of all the friends whose
authority could influence me, and he brought me word that Scotland was
not only ready to take arms, but under some sort of dissatisfaction to be
withheld from beginning; that in England the people were exasperated
against the Government to such a degree that, far from wanting to be
encouraged, they could not be restrained from insulting it on every
occasion; that the whole Tory party was become avowedly Jacobite; that
many officers of the army and the majority of the soldiers were very well
affected to the cause; that the City of London was ready to rise; and
that the enterprises for seizing of several places were ripe for
execution: in a word, that most of the principal Tories were in a concert
with the Duke of Ormond, for I had pressed particularly to be informed
whether his Grace acted alone, or, if not, who were his council; and that
the others were so disposed that there remained no doubt of their joining
as soon as the first blow should be struck. He added that my friends
were a little surprised to observe that I lay neuter in such a
conjuncture. He represented to me the danger I ran of being prevented by
people of all sides from having the merit of engaging early in this
enterprise, and how unaccountable it would be for a man impeached and
attainted under the present Government to take no share in bringing about
a revolution so near at hand and so certain. He entreated that I would
defer no longer to join the Chevalier, to advise and assist in carrying
on his affairs, and to solicit and negotiate at the Court of France,
where my friends imagined that I should not fail to meet with a
favourable reception, and from whence they made no doubt of receiving
assistance in a situation of affairs so critical, so unexpected, and so
promising. He concluded by giving me a letter from the Pretender, whom
he had seen in his way to me, in which I was pressed to repair without
loss of time to Commercy; and this instance was grounded on the message
which the bearer of the letter had brought me from my friends in England.
Since he was sent to me, it had been more proper to have come directly
where I was; but he was in haste to make his own court, and to deliver
the assurances which were entrusted to him. Perhaps, too, he imagined
that he should tie the knot faster on me by acquainting me that my
friends had actually engaged for themselves and me, than by barely
telling me that they desired I would engage for myself and them.
In the progress of the conversation he related a multitude of facts which
satisfied me as to the general disposition of the people; but he gave me
little satisfaction as to the measures taken for improving this
disposition, for driving the business on with vigour if it tended to a
revolution, or for supporting it with advantage if it spun into a war.
When I questioned him concerning several persons whose disinclination to
the Government admitted of no doubt, and whose names, quality, and
experience were very essential to the success of the undertaking, he
owned to me that they kept a great reserve, and did, at most, but
encourage others to act by general and dark expressions.
I received this account and this summons ill in my bed; yet, important as
the matter was, a few minutes served to determine me. The circumstances
wanting to form a reasonable inducement to engage did not escape me. But
the smart of a Bill of Attainder tingled in every vein; and I looked on
my party to be under oppression and to call for my assistance. Besides
which I considered, first, that I should certainly be informed, when I
conferred with the Chevalier, of many particulars unknown to this
gentleman; for I did not imagine that you could be so near to take arms,
as he represented you to be, on no other foundation than that which he
exposed. And, secondly, that I was obliged in honour to declare, without
waiting for a more particular information of what might be expected from
England, since my friends had taken their resolution to declare, without
any previous assurance of what might be expected from France. This
second motive weighed extremely with me at that time; there is, however,
more sound than sense in it, and it contains the original error to which
all your subsequent errors, and the thread of misfortunes which followed,
are to be ascribed.
My resolution thus taken, I lost no time in repairing to Commercy. The
very first conversations with the Chevalier answered in no degree my
expectations; and I assure you, with great truth, that I began even then,
if not to repent of my own rashness, yet to be fully convinced both of
yours and mine.
He talked to me like a man who expected every moment to set out for
England or Scotland, but who did not very well know for which. And when
he entered into the particulars of his affairs I found that concerning
the former he had nothing more circumstantial nor positive to go upon
than what I had already heard. The advices which were sent from thence
contained such assurances of success as it was hard to think that men who
did not go upon the surest grounds would presume to give. But then these
assurances were general, and the authority seldom satisfactory. Those
which came from the best hands were verbal, and often conveyed by very
doubtful messengers; others came from men whose fortunes were as
desperate as their counsels; and others came from persons whose situation
in the world gave little reason to attend to their judgment in matters of
this kind.
The Duke of Ormond had been for some time, I cannot say how long, engaged
with the Chevalier. He had taken the direction of this whole affair, as
far as it related to England, upon himself, and had received a commission
for this purpose, which contained the most ample powers that could be
given. After this, one would be apt to imagine that the principles on
which the Pretender should proceed, and the Tories engage, in this
service had been laid down; that a regular and certain method of
correspondence had been established; that the necessary assistances had
been specified; and that positive assurances had been given of them.
Nothing less. In a matter as serious as this, all was loose and
abandoned to the disposition of fortune. The first point had never been
touched upon; by what I have said above you see how little care was taken
of the second; and as to the third, the Duke had asked a small body of
regular forces, a sum of money, and a quantity of arms and ammunition.
He had been told in answer by the Court of France that he must absolutely
despair of any number of troops whatever, but he had been made in general
to hope for some money, some arms, and some ammunition; a little sum had,
I think, been advanced to him. In a case so plain as this it is hard to
conceive how any man could err. The assistances demanded from France at
this time, and even greater than these, will appear, in the sequel of
this relation, by the sense of the whole party, to have been deemed
essentially necessary to success. In such an uncertainty, therefore,
whether even these could be obtained, or rather with so much reason to
apprehend that they could not, it was evident that the Tories ought to
have lain still. They might have helped the ferment against the
Government, but should have avoided with the utmost care the giving any
alarm or even suspicion of their true design, and have resumed or not
resumed it as the Chevalier was able or not able to provide the troops,
the arms, the money, etc. Instead of which those who were at the head of
the undertaking, and therefore answerable for the measures which were
pursued, suffered the business to jog merrily on. They knew in general
how little dependence was to be placed on foreign succour, but acted as
if they had been sure of it; while the party were rendered sanguine by
their passions, and made no doubt of subverting a Government they were
angry with, both one and the other made as much bustle and gave as great
alarm as would have been imprudent even at the eve of a general
insurrection. This appeared to me to be the state of things with respect
to England when I arrived at Commercy.
The Scots had long pressed the Chevalier to come amongst them, and had of
late sent frequent messages to quicken his departure, some of which were
delivered in terms much more zealous than respectful. The truth is, they
seemed in as much haste to begin as if they had thought themselves able
to do the work alone; as if they had been apprehensive of no danger but
that of seeing it taken out of their hands and of having the honour of it
shared by others. However, that which was wanting on the part of England
was not wanting in Scotland; the Scots talked aloud, but they were in a
condition to rise. They took little care to keep their intentions
secret, but they were disposed to put those intentions into immediate
execution, and thereby to render the secret no longer necessary. They
knew upon whom to depend for every part of the work, and they had
concerted with the Chevalier even to the place of his landing.
There was need of no great sagacity to perceive how unequal such
foundations were to the weight of the building designed to be raised on
them. The Scots, with all their zeal and all their valour, could bring
no revolution about unless in concurrence with the English; and among the
latter nothing was ripe for such an undertaking but the temper of the
people, if that was so. I thought, therefore, that the Pretender’s
friends in the North should be kept from rising till those in the South
had put themselves in a condition to act; and that in the meanwhile the
utmost endeavours ought to be used with the King of France to espouse the
cause; and that a plan of the design, with a more particular
specification of the succours desired, as well as of the time when and
the place to which they should be conveyed, ought to be written for;—all
which I was told by the Marshal of Berwick, who had the principal
direction at that time of these affairs in France, and I daresay very
truly, had been often asked, but never sent. I looked on this enterprise
to be of the nature of those which can hardly be undertaken more than
once, and I judged that the success of it would depend on timing as near
as possible together the insurrection in both parts of the island and the
succours from hence. The Pretender approved this opinion of mine. He
instructed me accordingly, and I left Lorraine after having accepted the
Seals much against my inclination. I made one condition with him; it was
this—that I should be at liberty to quit a station which my humour and
many other considerations made me think myself very unfit for, whenever
the occasion upon which I engaged was over, one way or other; and I
desire you to remember that I did so.
I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715. You will observe that
all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for,
was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours
necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from
England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and
whither they should be sent. Here I found a multitude of people at work,
and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination,
no order, no concert. Persons concerned in the management of these
affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case.
It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now. The
Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the
present designs as infallible. Every meeting-house which the populace
demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm
them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst
them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the
Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about,
without him, in a very few weeks.
Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face. Those who could write and
read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this pitch of
erudition had their secrets to whisper. No sex was excluded from this
Ministry. Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have seen in England, kept her
corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great wheel of our machine.
I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least too
strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the water at
the same time. The letters which came from thence seemed to me to
contain rather such things as the writers wished might be true, than such
as they knew to be so: and the accounts which were sent from hence were
of the same kind. The vanity of some and the credulity of others
supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I question not but very
many persons, some such I have known, did the same thing from a principle
which they took to be a very wise one: they imagined that they helped by
these means to maintain and to increase the spirit of the party in
England and France. They acted like Thoas, that turbulent Ætolian, who
brought Antiochus into Greece: “quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando
verbis copias ejus, erexerat multorum in Græcia animos; iisdem et regis
spem inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi.” Thus were numbers of people
employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an affectation
of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and in sounding the
alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their interest to surprise.
The Government of England was put on its guard: and the necessity of
acting, or of laying aside with some disadvantage all thoughts of acting
for the present, was precipitated before any measures necessary to enable
you to act had been prepared, or almost thought of.
If his Majesty did not, till some short time after this, declare the
intended invasion to Parliament it was not for want of information.
Before I came to Paris, what was doing had been discovered. The little
armament made at the Havre, which furnished the only means the Chevalier
then had for his transportation into Britain, which had exhausted the
treasury of St. Germains, and which contained all the arms and ammunition
that could be depended upon for the whole undertaking, though they were
hardly sufficient to begin the work even in Scotland, was talked of
publicly. A Minister less alert and less capable than the Earl of Stair
would easily have been at the bottom of the secret, for so it was called,
when the particulars of messages received and sent, the names of the
persons from whom they came, and by whom they were carried, were
whispered about at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.
In short, what by the indiscretion of people here, what by the rebound
which came often back from London, what by the private interests and
ambitious views of persons in the French Court, and what by other causes
unnecessary to be examined now, the most private transactions came to
light: and they who imagined that they trusted their heads to the keeping
of one or two friends, were in reality at the mercy of numbers. Into
such company was I fallen for my sins; and it is upon the credit of such
a mob Ministry that the Tories have judged me capable of betraying a
trust, or incapable of discharging it.
I had made very little progress in the business which brought me to
Paris, when the paper so long expected was sent, in pursuance of former
instances, from England. The unanimous sense of the principal persons
engaged was contained in it. The whole had been dictated word for word
to the gentleman who brought it over, by the Earl of Mar, and it had been
delivered to him by the Duke of Ormond. I was driving in the wide ocean
without a compass when this dropped unexpectedly into my hands. I
received it joyfully, and I steered my course exactly by it. Whether the
persons from whom it came pursued the principles and observed the rules
which they laid down as the measures of their own conduct and of ours,
will appear by the sequel of this relation.
This memorial asserted that there were no hopes of succeeding in a
present undertaking, for many reasons deduced in it, without an immediate
and universal rising of the people in all parts of England upon the
Chevalier’s arrival; and that this insurrection was in no degree probable
unless he brought a body of regular troops along with him: that if this
attempt miscarried, his cause and his friends, the English liberty and
Government, would be utterly ruined: but if by coming without troops he
resolved to risk these and everything else, he must set out so as not to
arrive before the end of September, to justify which opinion many
arguments were urged. In this case twenty thousand arms, a train of
artillery, five hundred officers with their servants, and a considerable
sum of money were demanded: and as soon as they should be informed that
the Chevalier was in condition to make this provision, it was said that
notice should be given him of the places to which he might send, and of
the persons who were to be trusted. I do not mention some inconveniences
which they touched upon arising from a delay; because their opinion was
clearly for this delay, and because that they could not suppose that the
Chevalier would act, or that those about him would advise him to act,
contrary to the sense of all his friends in England. No time was lost in
making the proper use of this paper. As much of it as was fit to be
shown to this Court was translated into French, and laid before the King
of France. I was now able to speak with greater assurance, and in some
sort to undertake conditionally for the event of things.
The proposal of violating treaties so lately and so solemnly concluded,
was a very bold one to be made to people, whatever their inclinations
might be, whom the war had reduced to the lowest ebb of riches and power.
They would not hear of a direct and open engagement, such as the sending
a body of troops would have been; neither would they grant the whole of
what was asked in the second plan. But it was impossible for them, or
any one else, to foresee how far those steps which they were willing to
take, well improved, might have encouraged or forced them to go. They
granted us some succours, and the very ship in which the Pretender was to
transport himself was fitted out by Depine d’Anicant at the King of
France’s expense. They would have concealed these appearances as much as
they could; but the heat of the Whigs and the resentment of the Court of
England might have drawn them in. We should have been glad indirectly to
concur in fixing these things upon them: and, in a word, if the late King
had lived six months longer, I verily believe there had been war again
between England and France. This was the only point of time when these
affairs had, to my apprehension, the least reasonable appearance even of
possibility: all that preceded was wild and uncertain: all that followed
was mad and desperate. But this favourable aspect had an extreme short
duration. Two events soon happened, one of which cast a damp on all we
were doing, and the other rendered vain and fruitless all we had done.
The first was the arrival of the Duke of Ormond in France, the other was
the death of the King.
We had sounded the duke’s name high. His reputation and the opinion of
his power were great. The French began to believe that he was able to
form and to head a party; that the troops would join him; that the nation
would follow the signal whenever he drew his sword; and the voice of the
people, the echo of which was continually in their ears, confirmed them
in this belief. But when, in the midst of all these bright ideas, they
saw him arrive, almost literally alone, when, to excuse his coming, I was
obliged to tell them that he could not stay, they sank at once from their
hopes, and that which generally happens happened in this case: because
they had had too good an opinion of the cause, they began to form too bad
a one. Before this time, if they had no friendship for the Tories, they
had at least some consideration and esteem. After this, I saw nothing
but compassion in the best of them, and contempt in the others.
When I arrived at Paris, the King was already gone to Marly, where the
indisposition which he had begun to feel at Versailles increased upon
him. He was the best friend the Chevalier had: and when I engaged in
this business, my principal dependence was on his personal character.
This failed me to a great degree; he was not in a condition to exert the
same vigour as formerly. The Ministers who saw so great an event as his
death to be probably at hand, a certain minority, an uncertain regency,
perhaps confusion, at best a new face of Government and a new system of
affairs, would not, for their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the
public, venture to engage far in any new measures. All I had to
negotiate by myself first, and in conjunction with the Duke of Ormond
soon afterwards, languished with the King. My hopes sank as he declined,
and died when he expired. The event of things has sufficiently shown
that all those which were entertained by the duke and the Jacobite party
under the Regency, were founded on the grossest delusions imaginable.
Thus was the project become impracticable before the time arrived which
was fixed by those who directed things in England for putting it in
execution.
The new Government of France appeared to me like a strange country. I
was little acquainted with the roads. Most of the faces I met with were
unknown to me, and I hardly understood the language of the people. Of
the men who had been in power under the late reign, many were discarded,
and most of the others were too much taken up with the thoughts of
securing themselves under this, to receive applications in favour of the
Pretender. The two men who had the greatest appearance of favour and
power were D’Aguesseau and Noailles. One was made Chancellor, on the
death of Voisin, from Attorney-General; and the other was placed at the
head of the Treasury. The first passes for a man of parts, but he never
acted out of the sphere of the law: I had no acquaintance with him before
this time; and when you consider his circumstances and mine, you will not
think it could be very easy for me to get access to him now. The latter
I had known extremely well whilst the late King lived: and from the same
Court principle, as he was glad to be well with me then, he would hardly
know me now. The Minister who had the principal direction of foreign
affairs I lived in friendship with, and I must own, to his honour, that
he never encouraged a design which he knew that his Court had no
intention of supporting.