commercial enterprise. At his request John Locke drew for the state of Carolina a constitution in which toleration was a prominent idea. In the office of Lord Chancellor he earned an abiding reputation for speed and purity of justice. He was an ardent foe of the Dutch republic, the threatening rival of English prosperity. He opposed the Stop of the Exchequer. As the last act in the service of government he counselled the Declaration of Indulgence, for when that was withdrawn there was nothing more to hope from the crown in the fight for liberty. At last he knew the Catholic tendency of the king and, learning perhaps the dupe that he had been made by the Treaty of Dover, flung himself into the bitterest opposition. The foundation of the Whig party may be referred to the year 1675, when the French ambassador first contracted an alliance with a cabal consisting of four lords, Buckingham, Wharton, Ogle and, chief among them, Shaftesbury,[401] From that time onwards Shaftesbury enjoyed a growing ascendency over his partners. The fight over the bill of Non-Resistance brought them closely together; their victory, though it was by an artifice, gave them strength. But while the new party gained followers in Parliament and support in the country, it was some time before further success was achieved. The Cavalier, otherwise known by the nicknames of the Pensioned and the Pump, Parliament depended too much on the court to allow the possibility of complete triumph to the opposition.[402] Away from Westminster the terror of popery, with a Catholic successor to the crown in view, dominated the country, and on this basis the programme of the Whigs was constructed. Popery and slavery, to quote Shaftesbury’s memorable phrase, went hand in hand. The Whigs aimed at securing the liberties of the nation and reducing the Catholic religion to impotence. The overthrow of Danby with his policy of Anglican supremacy, the dissolution of the House of Commons which lavish and ingenious corruption had bound to his side, the destruction of the Catholic strength in the House of Lords, the downfall of the Duke of York; these were the main ideas in their system. Yet so long as the Lord Treasurer led the Commons by his purse-strings they were unable to mark progress in the open, however much they might gain behind the scenes. So the next two years brought only failure. When Parliament met in February 1677 after a prorogation of fifteen months, the Whigs, resting their case on an obsolete statute of Edward III, elected to argue that after so long an interval it had no legal existence. The move resulted in immediate victory to the government, and Buckingham, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, and Wharton, the chief movers in the Lords, being ordered to ask pardon of the House for their offence, and refusing, were sent to the Tower. Thus, said Marvell, a prorogation without precedent was to be warranted by an imprisonment without example. Danby was strong enough to obtain an