[41a] Matthew Prior, poet and diplomatist, had been deprived of his Commissionership of Trade by the Whigs, but was rewarded for his Tory principles in 1711 by a Commissionership of Customs.
[41b] “The twentieth parts are 12d. in the £1 paid annually out of all ecclesiastical benefices as they were valued at the Reformation. They amount to about £500 per annum; but are of little or no value to the Queen after the offices and other charges are paid, though of much trouble and vexation to the clergy” (Swift’s “Memorial to Mr. Harley”).
[41c] Charles Mordaunt, the brilliant but erratic Earl of Peterborough, had been engaged for two years, after the unsatisfactory inquiry into his conduct in Spain by the House of Lords in 1708, in preparing an account of the money he had received and expended. The change of Government brought him relief from his troubles; in November he was made Captain-General of Marines, and in December he was nominated Ambassador Extraordinary to Vienna.
[41d] Tapped, nudged.
[41e] I.e., told only to you.
[41f] Sir Hew Dalrymple (1652–1737), Lord President of the Court of Session, and son of the first Viscount Stair.
[41g] Robert Benson, a moderate Tory, was made a Lord of the Treasury in August 1710, and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the following June, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Bingley in 1713. He died in 1731.
[42a] The Smyrna Coffee-house was on the north side of Pall Mall, opposite Marlborough House. In the Tatler (Nos. 10, 78) Steele laughed at the “cluster of wise heads” to be found every evening at the Smyrna; and Goldsmith says that Beau Nash would wait a whole day at a window at the Smyrna, in order to receive a bow from the Prince or the Duchess of Marlborough, and would then look round upon the company for admiration and respect.