House of Commons as to the quarrel between this commander and the board of admiralty. They chose to support one who was secretly a traitor, because he bore the name of whig, tolerating his infamous neglect of duty and contemptible excuses; in order to pull down an honest, though not very able minister, who belonged to the tories.[184] But they saw clearly that the king was betrayed, though mistaken, in this instance, as to the persons; and were right in concluding that the men who had effected the revolution were in general most likely to maintain it; or, in the words of a committee of the whole house, "That his majesty be humbly advised, for the necessary support of his government, to employ in his councils and management of his affairs such persons only whose principles oblige them to stand by him and his right against the late King James, and all other pretenders whatsoever."[185] It is plain from this and other votes of the Commons, that the tories had lost that majority which they seem to have held in the first session of this parliament.[186] It is not, however, to be inferred from this extensive combination in favour of the banished king, that his party embraced the majority of the nation, or that he could have been restored with any general testimonies of satisfaction. The friends of the revolution were still by far the more powerful body. Even the secret emissaries of James confess that the common people were strongly prejudiced against his return. His own enumeration of peers attached to his cause cannot be brought to more than thirty, exclusive of catholics;[187] and the real Jacobites were, I believe, in a far less proportion among the Commons. The hopes of that wretched victim of his own bigotry and violence rested less on the loyalty of his former subjects, or on their disaffection to his rival, than on the perfidious conspiracy of English statesmen and admirals, of lord-lieutenants and governors of towns, and on so numerous a French army as an ill-defended and disunited kingdom would be incapable to resist. He was to return, not as his brother, alone and unarmed, strong only in the consentient voice of the nation, but amidst the bayonets of 30,000 French auxiliaries. These were the pledges of just and constitutional rule, whom our patriot Jacobites invoked against the despotism of William III. It was from a king of the house of Stuart, from James II., from one thus encircled by the soldiers of Louis XIV., that we were to receive the guarantee of civil and religious liberty. Happily the determined love of arbitrary power, burning unextinguished amidst exile and disgrace, would not permit him to promise, in any distinct manner, those securities which a large portion of his own adherents required. The Jacobite faction was divided between compounders and non-compounders; the one insisting on the necessity of holding forth a promise of such new enactments upon the king's restoration as might