the son of James, listening to the remonstrances of his English adherents, could have been induced to renounce a faith which, in the eyes of too many, was the sole pretext for his exclusion.[333] _Accession of George I._--The queen's death, which came at last perhaps rather more quickly than was foreseen, broke for ever the fair prospects of her family. George I., unknown and absent, was proclaimed without a single murmur, as if the Crown had passed in the most regular descent. But this was a momentary calm. The jacobite party, recovering from the first consternation, availed itself of its usual arms, and of those with which the new king injudiciously supplied it. Many of the tories who would have acquiesced in the act of settlement, seem to have looked on a leading share in the administration as belonging of right to what was called the church party, and complained of the formation of a ministry on the whig principle. In later times also, it has been not uncommon to censure George I. for governing, as it is called, by a faction. Nothing can be more unreasonable than this reproach. Was he to select those as his advisers, who had been, as we know and as he believed, in a conspiracy with his competitor? Was Lord Oxford, even if the king thought him faithful, capable of uniting with any public men, hated as he was on each side? Were not the tories as truly a faction as their adversaries, and as intolerant during their own power?[334] Was there not, above all, a danger that, if some of one denomination were drawn by pique and disappointment into the ranks of the jacobites, the whigs, on the other hand, so ungratefully and perfidiously recompensed for their arduous services to the house of Hanover, might think all royalty irreconcilable with the principles of freedom, and raise up a republican party, of which the scattered elements were sufficiently discernible in the nation?[335] The exclusion indeed of the whigs would have been so monstrous both in honour and policy, that the censure has generally fallen on their alleged monopoly of public offices. But the mischiefs of a disunited, hybrid ministry had been sufficiently manifest in the two last reigns; nor could George, a stranger to his people and their constitution, have undertaken without ruin that most difficult task of balancing parties and persons, to which the great mind of William had proved unequal. Nor is it true that the tories, as such, were proscribed; those who chose to serve the court met with court favour; and in the very outset the few men of sufficient eminence, who had testified their attachment to the succession, received equitable rewards; but, most happily for himself and the kingdom, most reasonably according to the principles on which alone his throne could rest, the first prince of the house of Brunswick gave a decisive preponderance in his favour to Walpole and Townshend above Harcourt and Bolingbroke.