that a post of the highest importance should have been filled up
in opposition to their known wishes, and with a haste and a
secresy which plainly showed that the King did not wish to be
annoyed by their remonstrances. The Lord Chamberlain pretended
that he had done all in his power to serve Wharton. But the Whig
chiefs were not men to be duped by the professions of so
notorious a liar. Montague bitterly described him as a fireship,
dangerous at best, but on the whole most dangerous as a consort,
and least dangerous when showing hostile colours. Smith, who was
the most efficient of Montague's lieutenants, both in the
Treasury and in the Parliament, cordially sympathised with his
leader. Sunderland was therefore left undefended. His enemies
became bolder and more vehement every day. Sir Thomas Dyke,
member for Grinstead, and Lord Norris, son of the Earl of
Abingdon, talked of moving an address requesting the King to
banish for ever from the Court and the Council that evil adviser
who had misled His Majesty's royal uncles, had betrayed the
liberties of the people, and had abjured the Protestant religion.

Sunderland had been uneasy from the first moment at which his
name had been mentioned in the House of Commons. He was now in an
agony of terror. The whole enigma of his life, an enigma of which
many unsatisfactory and some absurd explanations have been
propounded, is at once solved if we consider him as a man
insatiably greedy of wealth and power, and yet nervously
apprehensive of danger. He rushed with ravenous eagerness at
every bait which was offered to his cupidity. But any ominous
shadow, any threatening murmur, sufficed to stop him in his full
career, and to make him change his course or bury himself in a
hiding place. He ought to have thought himself fortunate indeed,