interest to surprise. The Government of England was put on its
guard: and the necessity of acting, or of laying aside with some
disadvantage all thoughts of acting for the present, was
precipitated before any measures necessary to enable you to act had
been prepared, or almost thought of.

If his Majesty did not, till some short time after this, declare the
intended invasion to Parliament it was not for want of information.
Before I came to Paris, what was doing had been discovered. The
little armament made at the Havre, which furnished the only means
the Chevalier then had for his transportation into Britain, which
had exhausted the treasury of St. Germains, and which contained all
the arms and ammunition that could be depended upon for the whole
undertaking, though they were hardly sufficient to begin the work
even in Scotland, was talked of publicly. A Minister less alert and
less capable than the Earl of Stair would easily have been at the
bottom of the secret, for so it was called, when the particulars of
messages received and sent, the names of the persons from whom they
came, and by whom they were carried, were whispered about at tea-
tables and in coffee-houses.

In short, what by the indiscretion of people here, what by the
rebound which came often back from London, what by the private
interests and ambitious views of persons in the French Court, and
what by other causes unnecessary to be examined now, the most
private transactions came to light: and they who imagined that they
trusted their heads to the keeping of one or two friends, were in
reality at the mercy of numbers. Into such company was I fallen for
my sins; and it is upon the credit of such a mob Ministry that the
Tories have judged me capable of betraying a trust, or incapable of