ments he used in supporting, after the Revolution, a motion for the removal of the sentence of attainder; but his journey to Cheshire he satisfactorily explained by a wish to visit a favourite child who was dangerously ill, and the desire, at that time of suspicion and jealousy, to keep out of the way. As, moreover, Thomas Saxon, the only witness who would positively swear to the correspondence of Delamere and Monmouth, so hopelessly contradicted himself that he was afterwards convicted of perjury, there was absolutely no case against him, and the committee of the lords, contrary to the advice of Jeffreys, who acted as lord high steward, gave a imanimous verdict of acquittal. The verdict was, according to Burnet (Own Time, i. 668), received with 'great joy by the whole town, which was now turned to be as much against the court as it had been of late years for it.' The joy did not arise from any special interest in Delamere personally, but from intense satisfaction that the reign of terror had shown such palpable signs of waning influence. The acquittal of Delamere marks in fact the beginning of successful resistance to the arbitrary authority of the court, and the rise of that new tide of political sentiment which was to prove fatal to the Stuart dynasty.
After the verdict Lord Delamere returned to Dunham Massey, taking little or no part in political affairs until the landing of the Prince of Orange, when he called together his tenants, and informing them that they had to choose whether they would be slaves and papists or protestants and freemen,' exhorted every one who had a good horse either to take the field or provide a substitute. Appearing at Manchester with fifty men armed and mounted, he speedily gathered a formidable force with which he marched south to join the prince. The statement of Sir John Dalrymple (Memoirs, 2nd ed. vol. ii. Appendix, 339) that 'Lord Delamere was not sufficiently expeditious in joining the Prince of Orange,' is therefore as much at variance with lact as are the premises of which it is a corollary that 'this was never forgiven by King William.' In December 168i8 Delamere was deputed, along with the Marquis of Halifax and the Earl of Shrewsbury, to intimate to King James the desirability of his removing from the palace at Whitehall to some place outside the metropolis. The ungrateful task he discharged with such delicate consideration for the feelings of the king, that James afterwards stated that he had ' treated him with much more regard than the other two lords to whom he had been kind, and from whom he might better have expected it.' On 31 Jan. 1688-9, Lord Delamere supported in strong terms the motion in the House of Lords for declaring the throne vacant, assorting that ' if King James came again, he was resolved to fight against him, and would die single, with his sword in his hand, rather than pay him any obedience' (Clarendon, Diary, ii. 257). The decided character of his political sentiments, coupled with the special service he had rendered the cause of the Prince of Orange in the north of England, marked him out for important promotion under the new dynasty. On 13 Feb. 1688-9 he was chosen a privy councillor, and on 9 April following he received the second place at the board of the treasury with the office of chancellor of the exchequer, Mordaunt, who was created Earl of Monmouth, receiving the first place. On the 12th of the same month he was made lord-lieutenant of the city and county of Chester, and on 19 July was reappointed to his old office of custos rotulorum of the county. These appointments are a sufficient indication that King William had not been mortally offended by anything in his conduct at the Revolution. His retirement from the treasury board on 17 April 1690 can moreover be explained with unmistakable clearness on other grounds. The board as originally constituted comprehended elements utterly antagonistic. In their political convictions the Earl of Monmouth and Delamere were in a certain sense at one, but even here it has to be remembered that the opinions of Monmouth were modified by his fickle and pleasure-loving temperament, while the puritanic traditions of Delamere and the precise and logical character of his mind unfitted him for recognising the importance of compromise in practical politics. Apart from politics the two statesmen had nothing in common, and, according to Burnet, ' though most violent whigs they became great enemies' (Own Time, ii. 6). While their influence was weakened by their mutual antipathy, the real power passed into the hands of Godolphin, who, though his sympathies were in reality Jacobite, and though he occupied only the third place at the board, secured almost from the beginning, by his pre-eminent administrative talents and his skill in intrigue, the chief confidence of the king. Wliile his colleagues, according to Burnet, were infusing jealousies of the king into the nation, he took care to interpret their conduct so as to infuse jealousies of them into the king. The task of Godolphin, so far as Delamere was concerned, was not a difficult one, for Delamere made no secret of his strong desire for more stringent restrictions of the royal prerogative,
