Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 4.djvu/374

366 however, I must needs grant to be one of the most effectual, vigorous, and resolute proceedings that I have yet met with in reading or information. For the long parliament under king Charles I, although it should be allowed of good authority, will hardly amount to an example.

I must again urge and repeat, that those who charge the earl of Oxford, and the rest of that ministry, with a design of altering the succession of the crown in favour of the pretender, will perhaps be at some difficulty to fix the time, when that design was in agitation: for, if such an attempt had begun with their power, it is not easy to assign a reason why it did not succeed; because there were certain periods, when her majesty and her servants were extremely popular, and the house of Hanover not altogether so much, upon account of some behaviour here, and some other circumstances that may better be passed over in silence: all which, however, had no other consequence, than that of repeated messages of kindness and assurance to the elector. During the last two years of the queen's life, her health was in such a condition, that it was wondered how she could hold out so long: and then, as I have already observed, it was too late and hazardous to engage in an enterprise which required so much time, and which the ministers themselves had rendered impracticable, by the whole course of their former proceedings, as well as by the continuance and heightening of those dissensions, which had early risen among them.

The party now in power will easily agree, that this design of overthrowing the succession, could not be owing