u shall hear more of me." "God give you repentance,"
answered the Bishop. "For, depend upon it, you are in much more danger
of being damned than I of being impeached." [281]

Forty-eight hours after the detection of this execrable fraud,
Marlborough was admitted to bail. Young and Blackhead had done him an
inestimable service. That he was concerned in a plot quite as criminal
as that which they had falsely imputed to him, and that the government
was to possession of moral proofs of his guilt, is now certain. But his
contemporaries had not, as we have, the evidence of his perfidy before
them. They knew that he had been accused of an offence of which he was
innocent, that perjury and forgery had been employed to ruin him, and
that, in consequence of these machinations, he had passed some weeks in
the Tower. There was in the public mind a very natural confusion between
his disgrace and his imprisonment. He had been imprisoned without
sufficient cause. Might it not, in the absence of all information, be
reasonably presumed that he had been disgraced without sufficient cause?
It was certain that a vile calumny, destitute of all foundation, had
caused him to be treated as a criminal in May. Was it not probable,
then, that calumny might have deprived him of his master's favour in
January?

Young's resources were not yet exhausted. As soon as he had been carried
back from Whitehall to Newgate, he set himself to construct a new
plot, and to find a new accomplice. He addressed himself to a man named
Holland, who was in the lowest state of poverty. Never, said Young, was
there such a golden opportunity. A bold, shrewd, fellow might easily
earn five hundred pounds. To Holland five hundred pounds seemed fabulous
wealth. What, he asked, was he to do for it? Nothing, he was told,
but to speak the truth, that was to say, substantial truth, a little
disguised and coloured. There really was a plot; and this would have
been proved if Blackhead had not been bought off. His desertion had made
it necessary to call in the help of fiction. "You must swear that you
and I were in a back room upstairs at the Lobster in Southwark. Some men
came to meet us there. They gave a password before they were admitted.
They were all in white camlet cloaks. They signed the Association in our
presence. Then they paid each his shilling and went away. And you must
be ready to identify my Lord Marlborough and the Bishop of Rochester as
two of these men." "How c