With the new reign began a new era. The revolution of 1688 had been singularly moderate and reasonable; it had not claimed a new right, it had not added a liberty to the rights and liberties which England then enjoyed; it had not changed a custom; it did not renounce one of the forms or ceremonies observed in the old times, and dear to the veneration of the people; it had simply proclaimed in principle and established in fact that the nation regarded its rights and liberties as its most precious treasure, that it placed them above hereditary titles and the rights of the throne. Liberal as well as legal, it demanded from the prince a certain measure of good government and of respect for the national wishes, at the same time that it unrolled from the mists of the past those grand principles of the compact of sovereign and people, which England had known how to keep and guard through perils and through oppression. The work of liberty was not yet complete; all its seeds rested in the Declaration of Rights drawn up by Somers, and solemnly accepted by the new sovereigns. The bitter time of revolutions had ended for England. Yet the day of rest had not come. The reign of William III. was to remain constantly troublesome, disputed, stormy. The reasons of this were various and complicated. In the first place stood his birth; he was a Dutchman in heart as in race, a stranger in his tastes as in his manners to England, which never forgot the fact. Both free and Protestant, the two countries were nevertheless separated by wide divergencies. In England the Whigs and Tories divided among them the upper classes; the tendencies toward republicanism existed in the dark among a certain number of dissenters; the Anglican Church, the Presbyterians, the Catholics, were royalists by taste as by principle. {17} In Holland, on the other hand, the mercantile patriciate remained nearly everywhere zealously attached to the republican form; the partisans of the stadtholdership of the house of Orange were counted in the army and among the great property-holders: and part of the provinces of Guelders and Friesland was equally devoted to it.