, time was not given to show
whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one
course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and
that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him
much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did
not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English
freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts
was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their
faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what
such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more
earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of
the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without
striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of
even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the
Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the
consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged
Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the
monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at
the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf
to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule
was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an
impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of
the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the
Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the
Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the
Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly
support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep
distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and
though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to
the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive
one that they refused to take office.

[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]

The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it
placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did
even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as
a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory
party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In