large share in the military administration. The emoluments,
direct and indirect, of the places and commands which he held
under the Crown were believed at the Dutch Embassy to amount to
twelve thousand pounds a year. In the event of a
counterrevolution it seemed that he had nothing in prospect but a
garret in Holland, or a scaffold on Tower Hill. It might
therefore have been expected that he would serve his new master
with fidelity, not indeed with the fidelity of Nottingham, which
was the fidelity of conscientiousness, not with the fidelity of
Portland, which was the fidelity of affection, but with the not
less stubborn fidelity of despair.

Those who thought thus knew but little of Marlborough. Confident
in his own powers of deception, he resolved, since the Jacobite
agents would not seek him, to seek them. He therefore sent to beg
an interview with Colonel Edward Sackville.

Sackville was astonished and not much pleased by the message. He
was a sturdy Cavalier of the old school. He had been persecuted
in the days of the Popish plot for manfully saying what he
thought, and what every body now thinks, about Oates and
Bedloe.64 Since the Revolution he had put his neck in peril for
King James, had been chased by officers with warrants, and had
been designated as a traitor in a proclamation to which
Marlborough himself had been a party.65 It was not without
reluctance that the stanch royalist crossed the hated threshold
of the deserter. He was repaid for his effort by the edifying
spectacle of such an agony of repentance as he had never before
seen. "Will you," said Marlborough, "be my intercessor with the
King? Will you tell him what I suffer? My crimes now appear to me