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I foresee what will be alleged to the clause of my obligation, etc., to great persons, and I resolve to give my adversaries all the advantage they can desire by acknowledging beforehand, that no obligation to the queen, or to any benefactor, can justify any man’s acting against the interest of his country, against his principles, his conscience, and his former profession.

I think this will anticipate all that can be said upon that head, and it will then remain to tell the fact, as I am not chargeable with it; which I shall do as clearly as possible in a few words.

It is none of my work to enter into the conduct of the queen or of the ministry in this case; the question is not what they have done, but what I have done; and though I am very far from thinking of them as some other people think, yet, for the sake of the present argument, I am to give them all up, and suppose, though not granting, that all which is suggested of them by the worst temper, the most censorious writer, the most scandalous pamphlet or lampoon should be true; and I’ll go through some of the particulars, as I meet with them in public.

1st. That they made a scandalous peace, unjustly broke the alliance, betrayed the confederates, and sold us all to the French.

God forbid it should be all truth, in the manner that we see it in print; but that I say is none of my business. But what hand had I in all this? I never wrote one word for the peace before it was made, or to justify it after it was made; let them produce it if they can. Nay, in a Review upon that subject while it was making, I printed it in plainer words than other men durst speak it at that time, that I did not like the peace, nor did I like any peace that was making since that of the partition, and that the protestant interest was not taken care of either in that or the treaty of Gertrudenburgh before it.

It is true that I did say, that since the peace was made, and we could not help it, that it was our business and our duty to make the best of it, to make the utmost advantage of it by commerce, navigation, and all kind of improvement that we could, and this I say still; and I must think it is more our duty to do so than the exclamations against the thing itself, which it is not in our power to retrieve. This is all that the worst enemy I have can charge me with. After the peace was made, and the Dutch and the emperor stood out, I gave my opinion of what I foresaw would necessarily be the consequence of that difference, viz., that it would inevitably involve these nations in a war with one or other of them; any one who was master of common sense in the public affairs might see that the standing out of the Dutch could have no other event. For if the confederates had conquered the French, they would certainly have fallen upon us by way of resentment, and there was no doubt but the same councils that led us to make a peace would oblige us to maintain it, by preventing too great impressions upon the French.

On the other hand, I alleged, that should the French prevail against the Dutch, unless he stopped at such limitations of conquest as the treaty obliged him to do, we must have been under the same necessity to renew the war against France; and for this reason, seeing we had made a peace, we were obliged to bring the rest of the confederates into it, and to bring the French to give them all such terms as they ought to be satisfied with.