Secretary of State going out?" said
William. "No, Sir," answered the Lord President; "I met nobody but my
Lord Sidney." "He is the new Secretary," said William. "He will do till
I find a fit man; and he will be quite willing to resign as soon as I
find a fit man. Any other person that I could put in would think himself
ill used if I were to put him out." If William had said all that was in
his mind, he would probably have added that Sidney, though not a great
orator or statesman, was one of the very few English politicians who
could be as entirely trusted as Bentinck or Zulestein. Caermarthen
listened with a bitter smile. It was new, he afterwards said, to see a
nobleman placed in the Secretary's office, as a footman was placed in
a box at the theatre, merely in order to keep a seat till his betters
came. But this jest was a cover for serious mortification and alarm. The
situation of the prime minister was unpleasant and even perilous;
and the duration of his power would probably have been short, had
not fortune, just at this moment, put it in his power to confound his
adversaries by rendering a great service to the state, [808]

The Jacobites had seemed in August to be completely crushed. The victory
of the Boyne, and the irresistible explosion of patriotic feeling
produced by the appearance of Tourville's fleet on the coast of
Devonshire, had cowed the boldest champions of hereditary right. Most of
the chief plotters passed some weeks in confinement or in concealment.
But, widely as the ramifications of the conspiracy had extended, only
one traitor suffered the punishment of his crime. This was a man named
Godfrey Cross, who kept an inn on the beach near Rye, and who, when
the French fleet was on the coast of Sussex, had given information
to Tourville. When it appeared that this solitary example was thought
sufficient, when the danger of invasion was over, when the popular
enthusiasm excited by that danger had subsided, when the lenity of the
government had permitted some conspirators to leave their prisons and
had encouraged others to venture out of their hidingplaces, the faction
which had been prostrated and stunned began to give signs of returning
animation. The old traitors again mustered at the old haunts, exchanged
significant looks and eager whispers, and drew from their pockets libels
on the Court of Kensington, and letters in milk and lemon juice from the
Court of Saint Germains. Preston, Dartmouth, Clarendo