lawful King."

If the First Lord of the Treasury really had scruples about
betraying his trust, those scruples were soon so effectually
removed that he very complacently continued, during six years, to
eat the bread of one master, while secretly sending professions
of attachment and promises of service to another.

The truth is that Godolphin was under the influence of a mind far
more powerful and far more depraved than his own. His
perplexities had been imparted to Marlborough, to whom he had
long been bound by such friendship as two very unprincipled men
are capable of feeling for each other, and to whom he was
afterwards bound by close domestic ties.

Marlborough was in a very different situation from that of
William's other servants. Lloyd might make overtures to Russell,
and Bulkeley to Godolphin. But all the agents of the banished
Court stood aloof from the traitor of Salisbury. That shameful
night seemed to have for ever separated the perjured deserter
from the Prince whom he had ruined. James had, even in the last
extremity, when his army was in full retreat, when his whole
kingdom had risen against him, declared that he would never
pardon Churchill, never, never. By all the Jacobites the name of
Churchill was held in peculiar abhorrence; and, in the prose and
verse which came forth daily from their secret presses, a
precedence in infamy, among all the many traitors of the age, was
assigned to him. In the order of things which had sprung from the
Revolution, he was one of the great men of England, high in the
state, high in the army. He had been created an Earl. He had a