t because it is sometimes to
the east and sometimes to the west of the pointers. To have defended the
ancient and legal constitution of the realm against a seditious populace
at one conjuncture and against a tyrannical government at another; to
have been the foremost defender of order in the turbulent Parliament of
1680 and the foremost defender of liberty in the servile Parliament of
1685; to have been just and merciful to Roman Catholics in the days of
the Popish plot and to Exclusionists in the days of the Rye House Plot;
to have done all in his power to save both the head of Stafford and
the head of Russell; this was a course which contemporaries, heated
by passion and deluded by names and badges, might not unnaturally call
fickle, but which deserves a very different name from the late justice
of posterity.

There is one and only one deep stain on the memory of this eminent man.
It is melancholy to think that he, who had acted so great a part in the
Convention, could have afterwards stooped to hold communication with
Saint Germains. The fact cannot be disputed; yet for him there are
excuses which cannot be pleaded for others who were guilty of the same
crime. He did not, like Marlborough, Russell, Godolphin and Shrewsbury,
betray a master by whom he was trusted, and with whose benefits he was
loaded. It was by the ingratitude and malice of the Whigs that he was
driven to take shelter for a moment among the Jacobites. It may be added
that he soon repented of the error into which he had been hurried by
passion, that, though never reconciled to the Court, he distinguished
himself by his zeal for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and
that his last work was a tract in which he exhorted his countrymen to
remember that the public burdens, heavy as they might seem, were light
when compared with the yoke of France and of Rome. [565]

About a fortnight after the death of Halifax, a fate far more cruel than
death befell his old rival and enemy, the Lord President. That able,
ambitious and daring statesman was again hurled down from power. In his
first fall, terrible as it was, there had been something of dignity; and
he had, by availing himself with rare skill of an extraordinary crisis
in public affairs, risen once more to the most elevated position among
English subjects. The second ruin was indeed less violent than the
first; but it was ignominious and irretrievable.

The peculation and venality by which the official m