William of Normandy would scarcely have succeeded, great as his armament was, had it not been for the diversion effected in his favour by the landing of the Scandinavian pretender in the North, and the failure of provisions in Harold's Channel fleet, which compelled it to put into port. Louis of France was called in as a deliverer by the barons who were in arms against the tyranny of John; and it is not necessary to discuss the Tory description of the coming of William of Orange as a conquest of England by the Dutch. Bonaparte threatened invasion, but unhappily was unable to invade: unhappily we say, because if he had landed in England he would assuredly have there met his doom; the Russian campaign would have been antedated with a more complete result, and all the after-pages in the history of the Arch-Brigand would have been torn from the book of fate. England is indebted for her political liberties in great measure to the Teutonic character, but she is also in no small measure indebted to this immunity from invasion which has brought with it a comparative immunity from standing armies. In the Middle Ages the question between absolutism and that baronial liberty which was the germ and precursor of the popular liberty of after-times turned in great measure upon the relative strength of the national militia and of the bands of mercenaries kept in pay by overreaching kings. The bands of mercenaries brought over by John proved too strong for the patriot barons, and would have annulled the Great Charter, had not national liberty found a timely and powerful, though sinister, auxiliary in the ambition of the French. Prince Charles I. had no standing army, the troops taken into pay for the wars with Spain and France had been disbanded before the outbreak of the Revolution; and on that occasion the nation was able to overthrow the tyranny without looking abroad for assistance. But Charles II. had learned wisdom from his father's fate; he kept up a small standing army; and the Whigs, though at the crisis of the Exclusion Bill they laid their hands upon their swords, never ventured to draw them, but allowed themselves to be proscribed, their adherents to be ejected from the corporations, and their leaders to be brought to the scaffold. Resistance was in the same way rendered hopeless by the standing army of James II., and the patriots were compelled to stretch their hands for aid to William of Orange. Even so, it might have gone hard with them if James's soldiers, and above all Churchill, had been true to their paymaster. Navies are not political; they do not overthrow constitutions; and in the time of Charles I. it appears that the leading seamen were Protestant, inclined to the side of the Parliament. Perhaps Protestantism had been rendered fashionable in the navy by the naval wars with Spain.