tatesman must necessarily see his whole life in a
false light, and will be unable to discover any principle, good or bad,
Whig or Tory, to which his most important acts can be referred. But,
when we consider him as a man whose especial task was to join a crowd
of feeble, divided and dispirited states in firm and energetic union
against a common enemy, when we consider him as a man in whose eyes
England was important chiefly because, without her, the great coalition
which he projected must be incomplete, we shall be forced to admit
that no long career recorded in history has been more uniform from the
beginning to the close than that of this great Prince. [221]

The clue of which we are now possessed will enable us to track without
difficulty the course, in reality consistent, though in appearance
sometimes tortuous, which he pursued towards our domestic factions.
He clearly saw what had not escaped persons far inferior to him in
sagacity, that the enterprise on which his whole soul was intent
would probably be successful if England were on his side, would be
of uncertain issue if England were neutral, and would be hopeless if
England acted as she had acted in the days of the Cabal. He saw not less
clearly that between the foreign policy and the domestic policy of the
English government there was a close connection; that the sovereign of
this country, acting in harmony with the legislature, must always have a
great sway in the affairs of Christendom, and must also have an obvious
interest in opposing the undue aggrandisement of any continental
potentate; that, on the other hand, the sovereign, distrusted and
thwarted by the legislature, could be of little weight in European
politics, and that the whole of that little weight would be thrown into
the wrong scale. The Prince's first wish therefore was that there should
be concord between the throne and the Parliament. How that concord
should be established, and on which side concessions should be made,
were, in his view, questions of secondary importance. He would have
been best pleased, no doubt, to see a complete reconciliation effected
without the sacrifice of one tittle of the prerogative. For in the
integrity of that prerogative he had a reversionary interest; and
he was, by nature, at least as covetous of power and as impatient of
restraint as any of the Stuarts. But there was no flower of the crown
which he was not prepared to sacrifice, even after the crown had been