surrection, he had been placed under arrest, and his house
had been searched for arms. When the Dutch army was marching from Torbay
towards London, he and his eldest son Robert declared for the Prince
of Orange and a free Parliament, raised a large body of horse, took
possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal against Popery by
publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street of that city, a piece
of sculpture which to rigid precisians seemed idolatrous. Soon after the
Convention became a Parliament, Robert Harley was sent up to Westminster
as member for a Cornish borough. His conduct was such as might have
been expected from his birth and education. He was a Whig, and indeed an
intolerant and vindictive Whig. Nothing would satisfy him but a general
proscription of the Tories. His name appears in the list of those
members who voted for the Sacheverell clause; and, at the general
election which took place in the spring of 1690, the party which he had
persecuted made great exertions to keep him out of the House of Commons.
A cry was raised that the Harleys were mortal enemies of the Church; and
this cry produced so much effect that it was with difficulty that any of
them could obtain a seat. Such was the commencement of the public life
of a man whose name, a quarter of a century later, was inseparably
coupled with the High Church in the acclamations of Jacobite mobs. [482]

Soon, however, it began to be observed that in every division Harley
was in the company of those gentlemen who held his political opinions
in abhorrence; nor was this strange; for he affected the character of
a Whig of the old pattern; and before the Revolution it had always
been supposed that a Whig was a person who watched with jealousy every
exertion of the prerogative, who was slow to loose the strings of the
public purse, and who was extreme to mark the faults of the ministers
of the Crown. Such a Whig Harley still professed to be. He did not admit
that the recent change of dynasty had made any change in the duties of a
representative of the people. The new government ought to be observed as
suspiciously, checked as severely, and supplied as sparingly as the old
one. Acting on these principles he necessarily found himself acting
with men whose principles were diametrically opposed to his. He liked to
thwart the King; they liked to thwart the usurper; the consequence
was that, whenever there was an opportunity of thwarting William, the
Roundhead