alone.

The messenger sent by Devonshire found William at Loo. The King read the
confession, and saw at once with what objects it had been drawn up. It
contained little more than what he had long known, and had long, with
politic and generous dissimulation, affected not to know. If he spared,
employed and promoted men who had been false to him, it was not because
he was their dupe. His observation was quick and just; his intelligence
was good; and he had, during some years, had in his hands proofs of much
that Fenwick had only gathered from wandering reports. It has seemed
strange to many that a Prince of high spirit and acrimonious temper
should have treated servants, who had so deeply wronged him, with a
kindness hardly to be expected from the meekest of human beings. But
William was emphatically a statesman. Ill humour, the natural and
pardonable effect of much bodily and much mental suffering, might
sometimes impel him to give a tart answer. But never did he on any
important occasion indulge his angry passions at the expense of the
great interests of which he was the guardian. For the sake of those
interests, proud and imperious as he was by nature, he submitted
patiently to galling restraints, bore cruel indignities and
disappointments with the outward show of serenity, and not only forgave,
but often pretended not to see, offences which might well have moved him
to bitter resentment. He knew that he must work with such tools as
he had. If he was to govern England he must employ the public men of
England; and in his age, the public men of England, with much of a
peculiar kind of ability, were, as a class, lowminded and immoral. There
were doubtless exceptions. Such was Nottingham among the Tories, and
Somers among the Whigs. But the majority, both of the Tory and of the
Whig ministers of William, were men whose characters had taken the ply
in the days of the Antipuritan reaction. They had been formed in
two evil schools, in the most unprincipled of courts, and the most
unprincipled of oppositions, a court which took its character from
Charles, an opposition headed by Shaftesbury. From men so trained
it would have been unreasonable to expect disinterested and stedfast
fidelity to any cause. But though they could not be trusted, they might
be used and they might be useful. No reliance could be placed on their
principles but much reliance might be placed on their hopes and on their
fears; and of the two Kings who lai