il any
further against him than they were able to prevail in his absence
against Harley, whom his flight so seriously compromised. Nobody needs
to be told that the one last hope for conspirators whose plans are
being discovered is for all in the plot to stand together or all to fly
together. Bolingbroke does not seem to have given his associates any
chance of considering the position and making up their minds.

[Sidenote: 1715--The Committee of Secrecy]

A committee of secrecy was struck. It was composed {105} of twenty-one
members, and the hearts of Bolingbroke's friends may well have sunk
within them as they studied the names upon its roll. Many of its
members were conscientious Whigs--Whigs of conviction, eaten up with
the zeal of their house, like James Stanhope himself, and Spencer
Cowper and Lord Coningsby and young Lord Finch and Pulteney, now in his
period of full devotion to Walpole. There were Whig lawyers, like
Lechmere; there were steady, obtuse Whigs, like Edward Wortley Montagu,
husband of the brilliant and beautiful woman whom Pope first loved and
then hated. There was Aislabie, then Treasurer of the Navy, afterwards
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to disgrace at the bursting of
the South Sea Bubble, and who would at any time have elected to go with
the strongest, and loved to tread the path lighted by his own
impressions as to his own interests. Thomas Pitt, grandfather to the
great Chatham, the "Governor Pitt" of Madras, whose diamonds were
objects of admiration to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was a member of the
committee; and so was Sir Richard Onslow, afterwards speaker of the
House of Commons, and uncle of the much more celebrated "Speaker
Onslow." From none of these men could Bolingbroke have much favor to
expect. Those who were honest and unselfish would be ill-disposed
towards him because of their honesty and unselfishness; those who were
not exactly honest and certainly not unselfish, would, by reason of
their character, probably be only too anxious to help the winning party
to get rid of him. But the names that must have showed most formidable
in the eyes of Bolingbroke and his friends were those of Robert Walpole
and Richard Hampden. Two years before this time the persistent enmity
of Bolingbroke had sent Walpole to the Tower, branded with the charge
of corruption and expelled from the House of Commons. Now things are
changed indeed. Walpole is chairman of the committee, and