the first
House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories
hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their
strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement
among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond
fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the
Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham
seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the
wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the
Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was
still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite
designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow
to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring
about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk
however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they
might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and
solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the
decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did
was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and
appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the
Whigs.

[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Church.]

While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their
political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming
weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main
stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.
But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution,
the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart
indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan
spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious
revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which
changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the
fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt
against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or
the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress
of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been
left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material
channels opened to human energ