These innovations on the part of the new government were maintained on the score of its unsettled state, and want of hold on the national sentiment. It may seem a reproach to the house of Hanover that, connected as it ought to have been with the names most dear to English hearts, the protestant religion and civil liberty, it should have been driven to try the resources of tyranny, and to demand more authority, to exercise more control, than had been necessary for the worst of their predecessors. Much of this disaffection was owing to the cold reserve of George I., ignorant of the language, alien from the prejudices of his people, and continually absent in his electoral dominions, to which he seemed to sacrifice the nation's interest and the security of his own crown. It is certain that the acquisition of the duchies of Bremen and Verden for Hanover in 1716 exposed Great Britain to a very serious danger, by provoking the King of Sweden to join in a league for the restoration of the Pretender.[347] It might have been impossible (such was the precariousness of our revolution settlement) to have made the abdication of the electorate a condition of the house of Brunswick's succession; but the consequences of that connection, though much exaggerated by the factious and disaffected, were in various manners detrimental to English interests during these two reigns; and not the least in that they estranged the affections of the people from sovereigns whom they regarded as still foreign. _Jacobitism among the clergy._--The tory and jacobite factions, as I have observed, were powerful in the church. This had been the case ever since the revolution. The avowed non-jurors were busy with the press; and poured forth, especially during the encouragement they received in part of Anne's reign, a multitude of pamphlets, sometimes argumentative, more often virulently libellous. Their idle cry that the church was in danger, which both houses in 1704 thought fit to deny by a formal vote, alarmed a senseless multitude. Those who took the oaths were frequently known partisans of the exiled family; and those who affected to disclaim that cause, defended the new settlement with such timid or faithless arms as served only to give a triumph to the adversary. About the end of William's reign grew up the distinction of high and low churchmen; the first distinguished by great pretensions to sacerdotal power, both spiritual and temporal, by a repugnance to toleration, and by a firm adherence to the tory principle in the state; the latter by the opposite characteristics. These were pitched against each other in the two houses of convocation, an assembly which virtually ceased to exist under George I.