70

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CIIAP.

XIV,

7689 .

TheWhigsdissatis-fied withthe King.

members of Ms own party, the manner in which the leastrespectable members of that party renounced fellowship withhim in his distress, and threw on him the whole blame of crimeswhich they had encouraged him to commit, ought to have beena lesson to those intemperate friends of liberty who -wereclamouring for a new proscription. But it w T as a lesson whichtoo many of them disregarded. The King had, at the verycommencement of his reign, displeased them by appointing a fewTories and Trimmers to high offices; and the discontent excitedby these appointments had been inflamed by his attempt toobtain a general amnesty for the vanquished. He was in truthnot a man to be popular with the vindictive zealots of anyfaction. For among his peculiarities was a certain ungracioushumanity which rarely conciliated hisfoes, which often provokedhis adherents, but in which he doggedly persisted, withouttroubling himself either about the thanklessness of those whomhe had saved from destruction, or about the rage of those whomhe had disappointed of their revenge. Some of the Whigs nowspoke of him as bitterly as they had ever spoken of either of hisuncles. He was a Stuart after all, and was not a Stuart fornothing. Like the rest of the race, he loved arbitrary power.In Holland, he had succeeded in making himself, under theforms of a republican polity, scarcely less absolute than the oldhereditary Counts had been. In consequence of a strangecombination of circumstances, his interest had, during a shorttime, coincided with the interest of the English people: butthough he had been a deliverer by accident, he v r as a despot bynature. He had no sympathy with the just resentments of theWhigs. He had objects in view which the Whigs would notwillingly suffer any Sovereign to attain. He knew that theTories were the only tools for his purpose. He had therefore,from the moment at -which he took his seat on the throne,favoured them unduly. He "was now trying to procure an