e general
opinion at first was that the Whigs would win the day. But it soon
became clear that the fight would be a hard one. The mails had carried
out along all the high roads the tidings that, on the second of January,
the Commons had agreed to a retrospective penal law against the whole
Tory party, and that, on the tenth, that law would be considered for the
last time. The whole kingdom was moved from Northumberland to Cornwall.
A hundred knights and squires left their halls hung with mistletoe and
holly, and their boards groaning with brawn and plum porridge, and rode
up post to town, cursing the short days, the cold weather, the
miry roads and the villanous Whigs. The Whigs, too, brought up
reinforcements, but not to the same extent; for the clauses were
generally unpopular, and not without good cause. Assuredly no reasonable
man of any party will deny that the Tories, in surrendering to the Crown
all the municipal franchises of the realm, and, with those franchises,
the power of altering the constitution of the House of Commons,
committed a great fault. But in that fault the nation itself had been
an accomplice. If the Mayors and Aldermen whom it was now proposed to
punish had, when the tide of loyal enthusiasm ran high, sturdily refused
to comply with the wish of their Sovereign, they would have been
pointed at in the street as Roundhead knaves, preached at by the Rector,
lampooned in ballads, and probably burned in effigy before their own
doors. That a community should be hurried into errors alternately by
fear of tyranny and by fear of anarchy is doubtless a great evil. But
the remedy for that evil is not to punish for such errors some persons
who have merely erred with the rest, and who have since repented with
the rest. Nor ought it to have been forgotten that the offenders
against whom Sacheverell's clause was directed had, in 1688, made large
atonement for the misconduct of which they had been guilty in 1683. They
had, as a class, stood up firmly against the dispensing power; and most
of them had actually been turned out of their municipal offices by James
for refusing to support his policy. It is not strange therefore that
the attempt to inflict on all these men without exception a degrading
punishment should have raised such a storm of public indignation as many
Whig members of parliament were unwilling to face.

As the decisive conflict drew near, and as the muster of the Tories
became hourly stronger an