The beginning of the parliament was prophetic of what was to come. At the time no cause could seem lower than that of the court. The Whigs had swept the country at the elections. Everything at Whitehall, at the exchequer, in the services, was in disorder and disrepair. The royal household still clamoured for unpaid wages. The whole nation was in a ferment. Men’s minds were painfully divided by the project of exclusion. Innumerable cabals, intriguing one against another, troubled the surface of politics and clouded the depths. No one could tell what designs and what dangers any moment might bring forth. Above all no one could gauge the king’s intentions. Uncertainty reigned everywhere, and it seemed as if the opposing forces had but to make one push and thrust aside the resistance of government, order England as they would, and reign in peace.[336] A somewhat different light is shed by after events on “the very melancholy aspect” which Sir John Reresby noted in the kingdom. In spite of the clamour raised on all sides against feebleness and irresolution, the government had marshalled its strength with some adroitness. Danby was in the Tower. The army was in the act of being disbanded. The treasury was put into commission, and the Earl of Essex, whose austerity and popular sympathies could not but inspire some measure of confidence, named as first commissioner. Before Parliament assembled the Duke of York at his brother’s command had left the kingdom, and was watching events with wrath and foreboding, but with little influence, from across the Channel. Nothing that could betoken a conciliatory spirit in the court had been omitted. There followed a move still more important as a check to the unbridled Commons. The committee of secrecy had just been instructed to consider methods of impeachment of the five Popish lords, when on April 21 the king announced to Parliament that he had chosen a new privy council. The scheme he went on to outline, though attributed at the time to divers other heads, had its origin in the elegant fancy of Sir William Temple.[337] That excellent ambassador and gardener, returning from a mission to the Hague, found the turbulence of the state and the dangers surrounding the king such that he promptly set to considering how he might devise some advantage to his master’s service. Diplomatic experience and a natural bent to theoretical statesmanship were more prominent in his mind than knowledge of the practical expedients which must temper the keenness of political ideas in action. He saw Parliament daily encroaching, as it seemed to him, on the royal prerogative; he saw the king drawing apart from his people; he feared an open rupture which might throw the state into convulsion. On these considerations he evolved the notion of a third authority, which, standing midway between the two, should act at the same time as a cushion and as a link. The instrument he found in the privy council.