To have defended the ancient and legal constitution of the realm against a seditious populace at one conjuncture and against a tyrannical government at another; to have been the foremost defender of order in the turbulent Parliament of 1680 and the foremost defender of liberty in the servile Parliament of 1685; to have been just and merciful to Roman Catholics in the days of the Popish plot and to Exclusionists in the days of the Rye House Plot; to have done all in his power to save both the head of Stafford and the head of Russell; this was a course which contemporaries, heated by passion and deluded by names and badges, might not unnaturally call fickle, but which deserves a very different name from the late justice of posterity.
There is one and only one deep stain on the memory of this eminent man.
It is melancholy to think that he, who had acted so great a part in the Convention, could have afterwards stooped to hold communication with Saint Germains.

The fact cannot be disputed; yet for him there are excuses which cannot be pleaded for others who were guilty of the same crime.

He did not, like Marlborough, Russell, Godolphin and Shrewsbury, betray a master by whom he was trusted, and with whose benefits he was loaded.

It was by the ingratitude and malice of the Whigs that he was driven to take shelter for a moment among the Jacobites.

It may be added that he soon repented of the error into which he had been hurried by passion, that, though never reconciled to the Court, he distinguished himself by his zeal for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and that his last work was a tract in which he exhorted his countrymen to remember that the public burdens, heavy as they might seem, were light when compared with the yoke of France and of Rome.