ministers; but the time would come when there would be a sovereign of inferior powers. Then the body of ministers would step into his place. The old rude arrangements of the middle ages had provided by frequent depositions that an inefficient sovereign should cease to rule, and those arrangements had been imitated in the cases of Charles I. and James II. Still the claim to rule had, at least from the time of Henry III., been derived from hereditary descent, and the interruption, however frequently it might occur, had been regarded as something abnormal, only to be applied where there was an absolute necessity to prevent the wielder of executive authority from setting at defiance the determined purpose of the nation. After the Revolution not only had the king's title been so changed as to make him more directly than ever dependent on the nation, but he now called into existence a body which derived its own strength from its conformity with the wishes of the representatives of the nation. For the moment it seemed to be but a temporary expedient. When the war came to an end, the Whig party which had sustained William in his struggle with France split up. The dominant feeling of the House of Commons was no longer the desire to support the crown against a foreign enemy, but to make government as cheap as possible, leaving future dangers to the chances of the future. William had not so understood the new invention of a united ministry as binding him to take into his service a united ministry of men whom he regarded as fools and knaves. He allowed the Commons to reduce the army to a skeleton, to question his actions, and to treat him as if he were a cipher. But it was only by slow degrees that he was brought to acknowledge the necessity of choosing his ministers from amongst the men who had done these things. The Spanish succession. The time came when he needed again the support of the nation. The death of Charles II., the heirless king of the huge Spanish monarchy, had long been expected. Since the peace of Ryswick, William and Louis XIV. had come to terms by two successive partition treaties for a division of those vast territories in such a way that the whole of them should not fall into the hands of a near relation either of the king of France or of the emperor, the head of the house of Austria. When the king of Spain actually died in 1700, William seemed to have no authority in England whatever; and Louis was therefore encouraged to break his engagements, and to accept the whole of the Spanish inheritance for his grandson, who became Philip V. of Spain. William saw clearly that such predominance of France in Europe would lead to the development of pretensions unbearable to other states. But the House of Commons did not see it, even when the Dutch garrisons were driven by French troops out of the posts in the Spanish Netherlands which they had occupied for many years (1701). The Act of Settlement.