Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/24

10 design, nor his desire to make his peace at home. Mr. Harley discovered his correspondence: he knew he had wrote three letters to France, with advice of our affairs. This discovery was made a fortnight before monsieur de Guiscard's seizure. Mr. Harley was willing to convict him under his own hand; and accordingly took all necessary precaution, to have what letters he should write brought to the secretary's office. In the mean time persons were employed, that should give an account of all his motions; such who played with him, drank with him, walked with him; in a word, those who, under the pretence of diversion and friendship, should never lose sight of him, till that day, when he went to a merchant of his acquaintance in the city, and gave him a letter, with this request, "that he would be pleased to forward it, and let it be sent away with his own foreign letters."

This letter was brought to Mr. Harley; where he read monsieur Guiscard's advice to the ministers of France, "that they should invade England as soon as possible, whether they succeed or no; because the mischief it would do us would be irreparable: it would disconcert and divide us, ruin our credit, and do us a vast deal of hurt, &c."

On the eighth of March, the queen's inauguration day, monsieur de Guiscard, between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, was seized in the Mall, in St. James's park, by a warrant of high treason from Mr. secretary St. John, and carried by the queen's messengers to the Cockpit. He seemed then to have taken his resolution, and to determine that his ruin should be fatal to those persons who occasioned it, by desiring leave to send for a glass