Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 4.djvu/221

Rh countenance they made; for they knew very well that the French king had many plausible reasons to elude his promise, if he found cause to repent it; one condition of surrendering Dunkirk being a general armistice of all the troops in the British pay, which her majesty was not able to perform; and upon this failure, the mareschal de Villars (as we have before related) endeavoured to dissuade his court from accepting the conditions, and in the very interval while those difficulties were adjusting, the mareschal d'Uxelles, one of the French plenipotentiaries at Utrecht (whose inclinations, as well as those of his colleague mons. Mesnager, led him to favour the States more than Britain) assured the lord privy seal, "That the Dutch were then pressing to enter into separate measures with his master." And his lordship, in a visit to abbé de Polignac, observing a person to withdraw as he entered the abbé's chamber, was told by this minister, "That the person he saw was one Moleau of Amsterdam (mentioned before) a famous agent for the States with France, who had been entertaining him (the abbé) upon the same subject; but that he had refused to treat with Moleau, without the privity of England."

Mr. Harley, whom we mentioned above to have been sent early in the spring to Utrecht, continued longer in Holland than was at first expected; but, having received her majesty's farther instructions, was about this time arrived at Hanover. It was the misfortune of his electoral highness, to be very ill served by mons. Bothmar, his envoy here, who assisted at all the factious meetings of the discontented party, and deceived his master by a false representation of the kingdom, drawn from the Rh