Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/384

 376 MACPHERSON AND THE NAIRNE PAPERS July intrigued, were issued the same day that his own confinement was ordered. 1 (i) The Camaret Bay Letter.^ This letter has already been discussed by Colonel E. M. Lloyd in this Review,^ who proves that Marlborough only revealed what was common knowledge in England, and that orders to fortify Brest had been given before the arrival of his communication.* Colonel Pamell devoted the last ten pages of his article to a violent attack on Macpherson. Statements that Macpherson ' would have had ample opportunity for garbling, suppressing, concocting, or forging ', or that he ' lived, throve, and died in an atmosphere of vice and fraud ', require more adequate proofs than Colonel Pamell produced before they can be accepted. The evidence against Marlborough is too strong to be disproved by mere abuse of Macpherson, who only supplied a portion of the evidence, and who was not the first writer to charge Marlborough with Jacobite intrigues. To clear Marlborough it is necessary to believe that James and the other Jacobite writers lied and forged, that William lied to Burnet and imprisoned Marlborough on a false charge, that Sir Charles Lyttelton lied in a private letter — ^in short, that contemporaries and historians have been engaged in one gigantic conspiracy to blacken the fame of Marlborough. I prefer to believe that Marlborough tried to purchase his pardon in the event of a Jacobite restoration by the most harmless acts of disloyalty which would achieve the end in view. G. Davies. » Dalrymple, Memoirs, ed. 1771, i. 500. He was charged with high treason and abetting and adhering to their Majesties' enemies. » Carte MS. 181, fo. 572 ; Original Papers, i. 487 ; atUe, xiL 270-4. » Ante, ix. 130. that the date (3 May) proved that James received it nine days before it was written, depend on the assumption that 3 May is Old Style, and the supposed date of receipt, 4 May, New Style. I think it more probable that both dates are New Style, and represent the dates when two different people received the letter and translated or copied it. If it arrived at night this might easily happen.
 * Colonel Pamell's objections to the authenticity of this letter on the ground