mstances, his
interest had, during a short time, coincided with the interest of the
English people: but though he had been a deliverer by accident, he was
a despot by nature. He had no sympathy with the just resentments of the
Whigs. He had objects in view which the Whigs would not willingly suffer
any Sovereign to attain. He knew that the Tories were the only tools for
his purpose. He had therefore, from the moment at which he took his seat
on the throne, favoured them unduly. He was now trying to procure an
indemnity for those very delinquents whom he had, a few months before,
described in his Declaration as deserving of exemplary punishment. In
November he had told the world that the crimes in which these men had
borne a part had made it the duty of subjects to violate their oath of
allegiance, of soldiers to desert their standards, of children to make
war on their parents. With what consistency then could he recommend that
such crimes should be covered by a general oblivion? And was there not
too much reason to fear that he wished to save the agents of tyranny
from the fate which they merited, in the hope that, at some future time,
they might serve him as unscrupulously as they had served his father in
law? [416]

Of the members of the House of Commons who were animated by these
feelings, the fiercest and most audacious was Howe. He went so far on
one occasion as to move that an inquiry should be instituted into the
proceedings of the Parliament of 1685, and that some note of infamy
should be put on all who, in that Parliament, had voted with the Court.
This absurd and mischievous motion was discountenanced by all the most
respectable Whigs, and strongly opposed by Birch and Maynard, [417] Howe
was forced to give way: but he was a man whom no check could abash;
and he was encouraged by the applause of many hotheaded members of his
party, who were far from foreseeing that he would, after having been the
most rancorous and unprincipled of Whigs, become, at no distant time,
the most rancorous and unprincipled of Tories.

This quickwitted, restless and malignant politician, though himself
occupying a lucrative place in the royal household, declaimed, day after
day, against the manner in which the great offices of state were filled;
and his declamations were echoed, in tones somewhat less sharp and
vehement, by other orators. No man, they said, who had been a minister
of Charles or of James ought to be a minister of Wil