y with which he carried out his
"Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the
conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance
of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as
it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of
sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt
so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with
hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and
English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and
virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this
argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the
agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of
new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was
hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won
by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the
House of Hanover upon the throne.

[Sidenote: The Townshend Ministry.]

Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of
political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise
in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that
no reform was as important to the country at large as a national
reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the
necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on
the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who
still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give
fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool
against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh
hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole
clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he
could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.
Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter
hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up
charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him
from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of
George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he
was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the
jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men