As the tide of popular feeling seemed flowing in favour of the new King, the Government took advantage of it to dissolve Parliament, which had now sat for nearly six months since the death of Queen Anne. This Parliament behaved with dignity and circumspection at a crisis of English history. The majority of the members of the House of Commons were Tory, but, despite a certain element of Jacobitism, they had shown their loyal acquiescence in the Hanoverian succession in a variety of ways. They had voted to George the First a civil list of £700,000 per annum, of which £100,000 was for the Prince of Wales; they had even agreed, though with wry faces, to pay £65,000 which the King claimed as arrears due to his Hanoverian troops. The Tories had certainly earned more consideration from the King than they received. But the fiat had gone forth that there was to be no commerce with them, and Ministers were determined to obtain a Whig majority. To this end they not only employed all the resources of bribery and corruption by lavish expenditure of secret service money, but were so unconstitutional as to drag the King into the arena of party politics. In the Royal Proclamation summoning the new Parliament, the King was made to call upon the electors to baffle the designs of disaffected persons, and “to have a particular regard to such as showed a fondness to the Protestant succession when it was in danger”. This was perhaps to some extent justified by a manifesto which James had issued the previous August from Lorraine, in which he spoke of George as “a foreigner ignorant of the language, laws and customs of England,” and said he had been waiting to claim his rights on the death “of the Princess our sister, of whose good intentions towards us we could not for some time past well doubt”. This manifesto compromised the late Queen’s Ministers, and the Government determined to challenge the verdict of the country upon it. The Jacobites were quite willing to meet the issue. Riots broke out at Birmingham, Bristol, Chippenham, Norwich and other considerable towns in the kingdom. In the words of the old Cavalier song, it was declared that times would not mend “until the King enjoyed his own again,” and James’s health was drunk at public and private dinners by passing the wine glass over the water bottle, thus transforming the toast of “The King,” into “The King over the water”. The hawkers of pamphlets and ballads openly vended and shouted Jacobite songs in the streets, and many of them were prosecuted with great severity. Two forces, opposite enough in other ways, the Church and the Stage, were found to be united against the Government, and a Royal Proclamation was issued commanding the clergy not to touch upon politics in their sermons, and forbidding farces and plays which held Protestant dissenters up to ridicule.