housand to
near twenty thousand. No English King had ever, in time of peace, had
such a force at his command. Yet even with this force James was not
content. He often repeated that no confidence could be placed in the
fidelity of the train-bands, that they sympathized with all the passions
of the class to which they belonged, that, at Sedgemoor, there had been
more militia men in the rebel army than in the royal encampment, and
that, if the throne had been defended only by the array of the counties,
Monmouth would have marched in triumph from Lyme to London.

The revenue, large as it was when compared with that of former Kings,
barely sufficed to meet this new charge. A great part of the produce of
the new taxes was absorbed by the naval expenditure. At the close of the
late reign the whole cost of the army, the Tangier regiments included,
had been under three hundred thousand pounds a year. Six hundred
thousand pounds a year would not now suffice. [5] If any further
augmentation were made, it would be necessary to demand a supply
from Parliament; and it was not likely that Parliament would be in a
complying mood. The very name of standing army was hateful to the whole
nation, and to no part of the nation more hateful than to the Cavalier
gentlemen who filled the Lower House. In their minds a standing army
was inseparably associated with the Rump, with the Protector, with the
spoliation of the Church, with the purgation of the Universities, with
the abolition of the peerage, with the murder of the King, with the
sullen reign of the Saints, with cant and asceticism, with fines and
sequestrations, with the insults which Major Generals, sprung from
the dregs of the people, had offered to the oldest and most honourable
families of the kingdom. There was, moreover, scarcely a baronet or a
squire in the Parliament who did not owe part of his importance in his
own county to his rank in the militia. If that national force were
set aside, the gentry of England must lose much of their dignity and
influence. It was therefore probable that the King would find it more
difficult to obtain funds for the support of his army than even to
obtain the repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act.

But both the designs which have been mentioned were subordinate to one
great design on which the King's whole soul was bent, but which was
abhorred by those Tory gentlemen who were ready to shed their blood
for his rights, abhorred by that Church which had n