iaeval of mankind, could yet boast
about some mediaeval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury,
so they could appeal to a true mediaeval legend in the matter of a war
with France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole
could complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him with
traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was looking
for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the _naivete_
of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he was
really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediaeval
history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the
French could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black
Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, it
is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots will
always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves far
from unpatriotic; and James II. in particular may well be called the
founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France,
among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder
before and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided the
later Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England,
especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy.

The transformation through which the external relations of England
passed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two very
separate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king and
the second the accession of a German king. In the first were present all
the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the
second we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardly
call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like
a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and one
fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in
which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a
great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole
in the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they
were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as
he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He
was in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what
George was except that he was