Read it through once

The ministry known by the name of the Cabal seems to have consisted of characters so unprincipled, as justly to deserve the severity with which they have been treated by all writers who have mentioned them; but if it is probable that they were ready to betray their king, as well as their country, it is certain that the king betrayed them, keeping from them the real state of his connexion with France, and from some of them, at least, the secret of what he was pleased to call his religion. Whether this concealment on his part arose from his habitual treachery, and from the incapacity which men of that character feel of being open and honest, even when they know it is their interest to be so, or from an apprehension that they might demand for themselves some share of the French money, which he was unwilling to give them, cannot now be determined. But to the want of genuine and reciprocal confidence between him and those ministers is to be attributed, in a great measure, the escape which the nation at that time experienced--an escape, however, which proved to be only a reprieve from that servitude to which they were afterwards reduced in the latter years of the reign.