Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 2.djvu/432

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426
SHEFFIELD.

Shrewsbury discouraged the attempt, by declaring that Mulgrave would never concur. This king William afterwards told him, and asked what he would have done if the proposal had been made: "Sir," said he, "I would have discovered it to the king, whom I then served." To which king William replied, "I cannot blame you."

Finding king James irremediably excluded, he voted for the conjunctive sovereignty, upon this principle, that he thought the titles of the prince and his consort equal, and it would please the prince their protector to have a share in the sovereignty. This vote gratified king William: yet, either by the king's distrust, or his own discontent, he lived some years without employment. He looked on the king with malevolence, and, if his verses or his prose may be credited, with contempt. He was, notwithstanding this aversion or indifference, made marquis of Normandy (1694), but still opposed the court on some important questions; yet at last he was received into the cabinet council, with a pension of three thousand pounds.

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