In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter; and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive one that they refused to take office. [Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]