tor regarded the Churchills. It was not till he had been sone time reconciled to his sister-in-law that he ceased to regard her two favorite servants as his enemies. So late as the year 1696 he had been heard to say, "If I had been a private gentleman, my Lord Marlborough and I must have measured swords." All these things were now, it seemed, forgotten. The Duke of Gloucester's household had just been arranged. As he was not yet nine years old, and the civil list was burdened with a heavy debt, fifteen thousand pounds was thought for the present a sufficient provision. The child's literary education was directed by Burnet, with the title of preceptor. Marlborough was appointed governor; and the "London Gazette" announced his appointment, not with official dryness, but in the fervid language of panegyric. He was at the same time again sworn a member of the Privy Council from which he had been expelled with ignominy; and he was honored a few days later with a still higher mark of the king's confidence, a seat at the board of Regency.

Some persons imagined that they saw in this strange reconciliation a sign that the influence of Portland was on the wane, and that the influence of Albemarle was growing; for Marlborough had been many years at feud with Portland, and had even been so a rare event indeed much irritated as to speak of Portland in coarse and ungentlemanlike terms. With Albemarle on the other hand, Marlborough had studiously ingratiated himself by all the arts which a mind singularly observant and sagacious could learn from a long experience in courts; and it is possible that Albemarle may have removed some difficulties. It is hardly necessary, however, to resort to that supposition for the purpose of explaining why so wise a man as William forced himself, after some delay caused by very just and natural resentment, to act wisely. His opinion of Marlborough's character was probably unaltered. But he could not help perceiving that Marlborough's situation was widely different from what it had been a few years before. That very ambition that very avarice which had, in former times, impelled him to betray two masters, were now sufficient securities for his fidelity to the order of things which had been established by the Bill of Rights. If that order of things could be maintained inviolate, he could

scarcely fail to be, in a few years, the greatest and wealthiest subject in Europe. His military and political talents might therefore now be used without any apprehension that they would be turned against the government which used them. It is to be remembered, too, that he derived his importance less from his military and political talents, great as they were, than from the dominion which, through the instrumentality of his wife, he exercised over the mind of the princess. While he was on good terms with the court, it was certain that she would lend no countenance to any cabal which might attack either the title or the prerogatives of her brother-in-law. Confident that from this quarter, a quarter once the darkest and most stormy in the whole political horizon, nothing but sunshine and calm was now to be expected, William set out cheerfully on his expedition to his native country.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE Gazette which informed the public that the king had set out for Holland announced also the names of the first members returned, in obedience to his writ, by the constitu ent bodies of the real.n. The history of those times has been so little studied that few persons are aware how remarkable an epoch the general election of 1698 is in the history of the English Constitution.

We have seen that the extreme inconvenience which had resulted from the capricious and headstrong conduct of the House of Commons during the years immediately following the Revolution had forced William to resort to a political machinery which had been unknown to his predecessors, and of which the nature and operation were but very imperfectly understood by himself or by his ablest advisers. For the first time the administration was confided to a small body of statesmen, who, on all grave and pressing questions, agreed with each other and with the majority of the representatives of the people. The direc

tion of war and of diplomacy the king reserved to himself; and his servants, conscious that they were less versed than he in military affairs and in foreign affairs, were content to leave to him the command of the army, and to know only what he thought fit to communicate about the instructions which he gave to his own ambassadors, and about the conferences which he held with the ambassadors of other princes. But, with these important exceptions, the government was intrusted to what then began to be called the ministry.

The first English ministry was gradually formed, nor is it possible to say quite precisely when it began to exist. But, on the whole, the date from which the era of ministries may most properly be reckoned is the day of the meeting of the Parliament after the general election of 1695. That election had taken place at a time when peril and distress had called forth all the best qualities of the nation.

The hearts of men were in the struggle against France for independence, for liberty, and for the Protestant religion. Everybody knew that such a struggle could not be carried on without large establishments and heavy taxes. The government, therefore, could hardly ask for more than the country was ready to give. A House of Commons was chosen in which the Whig party had a decided preponderance. The leaders of that party had recently been raised, one by one, to the highest executive offices. The majority, therefore, readily arranged itself in admirable order under the ministers, and during three sessions gave them on almost every occasion a cordial support. The consequence was that the country was rescued from its dangerous position, and, when that Parliament had lived out its three years, enjoyed prosperity after a terrible commercial crisis, peace after a long and sanguinary war, and liberty united with order after civil troubles which had lasted during two generations, and in which sometimes order and sometimes liberty had been in danger of perishing.

Such were the fruits of the general election of 1695. The ministers had flattered themselves that the general election of 1698 would be equally favorable to them, and that in the new Parliament the old Parliament would revive. Nor is it strange that they should have indulged such a hope. Since they had been called to the direction of affairs, every thing had been changed-changed for the better, and changed chiefly by their wise and resolute policy, and by the firmness with which their party had stood by them. There was peace abroad and at home. The sentinels had ceased to watch by the beacons of DorsetIshire and Sussex. The merchant-ships went forth without fear from the Thames and the Avon. Soldiers had been disbanded by tens of thousands. Taxes had been remitted. The value of all public and private securities had risen. Trade had never been so brisk. Credit had never been so solid. All over the kingdom the shopkeepers and the farmers, the artisans and the ploughmen, relieved, beyond all hope, from the daily and hourly misery of the clipped silver, were blessing the broad faces of the new shillings and half crowns. The statesmen whose administration 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 coun

try 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 favors 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 malcontents. 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 armies and with the animosity to crown grants; for a brigade of Dutch troops was part of the military establishment which