would have reduced some of the chiefs of the Tory party to poverty. Yet
it was impossible to draw a distinction between the grants of William
and those of his two predecessors. Nobody could pretend that the law
had been altered since his accession. If, therefore, the grants of the
Stuarts were legal, so were his; if his grants were illegal, so were
the grants of his uncles. And, if both his grants and the grants of his
uncles were illegal, it was absurd to say that the mere lapse of time
made a difference. For not only was it part of the alphabet of the law
that there was no prescription against the Crown, but the thirty-eight
years which had elapsed since the Restoration would not have sufficed
to bar a writ of right brought by a private demandant against a wrongful
tenant. Nor could it be pretended that William had bestowed his favours
less judiciously than Charles and James. Those who were least friendly
to the Dutch would hardly venture to say that Portland, Zulestein and
Ginkell was less deserving of the royal bounty than the Duchess of
Cleveland and the Duchess of Portsmouth, than the progeny of Nell Gwynn,
than the apostate Arlington or the butcher Jeffreys. The opposition,
therefore, sullenly assented to what the ministry proposed. From that
moment the scheme was doomed. Everybody affected to be for it; and
everybody was really against it. The three bills were brought in
together, read a second time together, ordered to be committed together,
and were then, first mutilated, and at length quietly dropped.

In the history of the financial legislation of this session, there were
some episodes which deserve to be related. Those members, a numerous
body, who envied and dreaded Montague readily became the unconscious
tools of the cunning malice of Sunderland, whom Montague had refused
to defend in Parliament, and who, though detested by the opposition,
contrived to exercise some influence over that party through the
instrumentality of Charles Duncombe. Duncombe indeed had his own reasons
for hating Montague, who had turned him out of the place of Cashier of
the Excise. A serious charge was brought against the Board of Treasury,
and especially against its chief. He was the inventor of Exchequer
Bills; and they were popularly called Montague's notes. He had induced
the Parliament to enact that those bills, even when at a discount in the
market, should be received at par by the collectors of the revenue.
This enactment,