To the same eminent statesman was due the fact that for a whole generation British newspapers were so filled with falsehoods against France and Napoleon that an Englishman could not know the truth without leaving his country to hear it. To the same cause was due the league after league of Europe against France, which, beginning in 1793, reunited and renewed the struggle as often as opportunity offered until France was crushed, and the hands upon the clock of human progress put back a hundred years. Without England, the coalitions against republican France would have had trifling results. It was England which furnished inexhaustible supplies of money; England which scoured the ocean with her fleets and maintained the blockade. There had been a time when the French Revolution was not unpopular in Great Britain. This was when the reform movement was under the control of leaders who proclaimed their purpose to be to model the monarchy in France upon that of England. So long as professions of this sort were made, there was nothing to awaken distrust in staid, conservative England. Even aristocracy loves a fettered king. But when more radical men wrested leadership from the constitutionals, and boldly declared that the work of reform must strike deeper, must destroy feudalism root and branch, must consign a corpulent Church to the poverty whose beauties it preached, the lords and the bishops of Great Britain realized that the time had come when they must legislate, preach, pray, and fight against inovations which, if successful in France, would inevitably cross the narrow Channel.