The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion. But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and amid the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment of the Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but Whig. Passionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardianship of the whole state of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more. Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical as ever, and yet Nonconformists worshiped in their chapels and served as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William. Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the Church as Somers or Godolphin.

In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter; and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, 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 humor 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.

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 the first House of Commons indeed which was called by the new King, the Tories hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow at the Tory cause. England was still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk, however, of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House Of Hanover, and solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the Whigs.

While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church. But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution, the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England, "if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were up believers in any form of Christianity, and distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives. Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out 6f fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite education.

At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is bard to conceive, for the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the development of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left without much moral or religious training of any sort. " We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time, "and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of London or Birmingham burned houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and pillaged at their will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers in the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree, and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.