n had been so beneficent might be pardoned
if they expected the gratitude and confidence which they had fairly
earned. But it soon became clear that they had served their country only
too well for their own interest. In 1695 adversity and danger had made
men amenable to that control to which it is the glory of free nations to
submit themselves, the control of superior minds. In 1698 prosperity
and security had made men querulous, fastidious and unmanageable.
The government was assailed with equal violence from widely different
quarters. The opposition, made up of Tories many of whom carried Toryism
to the length of Jacobitism, and of discontented Whigs some of whom
carried Whiggism to the length of republicanism, called itself the
Country party, a name which had been popular before the words Whig and
Tory were known in England. The majority of the late House of Commons,
a majority which had saved the State, was nicknamed the Court party.
The Tory gentry, who were powerful in all the counties, had special
grievances. The whole patronage of the government, they said, was in
Whig hands. The old landed interest, the old Cavalier interest, had now
no share in the favours of the Crown. Every public office, every bench
of justice, every commission of Lieutenancy, was filled with Roundheads.
The Tory rectors and vicars were not less exasperated. They accused the
men in power of systematically protecting and preferring Presbyterians,
Latitudinarians, Arians, Socinians, Deists, Atheists. An orthodox
divine, a divine who held high the dignity of the priesthood and the
mystical virtue of the sacraments, who thought schism as great a sin as
theft and venerated the Icon as much as the Gospel, had no more chance
of a bishopric or a deanery than a Papist recusant. Such complaints
as these were not likely to call forth the sympathy of the Whig
malecontents. But there were three war cries in which all the enemies of
the government, from Trenchard to Seymour, could join: No standing
army; No grants of Crown property; and No Dutchmen. Multitudes of honest
freeholders and freemen were weak enough to believe that, unless the
land force, which had already been reduced below what the public safety
required, were altogether disbanded, the nation would be enslaved, and
that, if the estates which the King had given away were resumed, all
direct taxes might be abolished. The animosity to the Dutch mingled
itself both with the animosity to standing a