William's antecedents to believe that from the hour that he learned the strength of his party in England, down to the hour when he was presented with the crown in the banqueting chamber at Whitehall, he had eyes for little else than the great European future which would open before him as King of England; and that any hesitations he may have shown in accepting the sovereignty were as purely politic as those of Cæsar at the Lupercal. As regards his attitude towards English political institutions in general, and the _voluntary_ element in his share in developing them, the Whig legend appears to me more purely mythical still. At no time in his life did William show the slightest personal predilection for or even faith in parliamentary institutions, still less in party government. He looked upon the English Parliament as a clumsy and irritating instrument, blunt at one part, dangerously double-edged at another, which he was nevertheless bound to work with and make the best of. That he was the first to try the system of a party ministry and party government is, as I have essayed to show, a fact of little significance. He tried it as he tried other means of managing the apparently otherwise unmanageable, as he had at first tried dividing offices of State among the leading men of both parties, and as he had tried and continued to try the method of corruption for the rank and file. As to any preference of one English party to another there is no trace of such a feeling in his mind. From the moral point of view, I imagine, he regarded most of the leaders of both parties with an equal, and, it may be, with an equally just, contempt; but with his intellectual appreciations he never allowed his moral judgment to interfere. He used the unscrupulous Tory Marlborough and the unscrupulous Whig Sunderland with an impartial indifference to their political profligacy. He made trial, in fact, of all English public men and of all political expedients to serve his European ends, which were sometimes but not always English ends also; and thus it was that though he experimentalised with the strict party system in order to secure a Parliament which would support the war energetically in 1695, yet in the next Parliament, his immediate object being gained, he showed no disposition to prosecute that experiment on abstract political grounds. It is impossible to represent a ruler of this kind, however wise and moderate, as _consciously_ training our parliamentary institutions upon the peculiar lines of growth which they subsequently followed.