History has done justice to these well-meaning efforts of William; but the political virtue which for the moment was its own reward, must, one imagines, have been felt by him as painfully unremunerative. He could not have expected to be personally popular, and he was not, though Macaulay, in his desire for strong pictorial effect, has surely exaggerated his unpopularity. But he, no doubt, counted upon wielding a greater civil influence at the outset of his career than he in fact discovered to be his, and must have learned, with some chagrin, that he had failed to realise the vehemence of those English party conflicts in which not even the ablest and best intentioned of mediators can interpose without disappointment until he has mastered all the secrets of their intensity. On the whole, one can easily understand the feeling of satisfaction with which he hailed the coming of the hour when he, with whom the instincts of the European statesman and soldier were always dominant over these of the domestic administrator, was once more summoned to activity in one of the two arts in which he shone. On the 19th of April the Commons presented an address to the Crown, in which, after reciting the various acts of hostility committed by Louis XIV. against their country, "particularly the present invasion of Ireland," they assured William that when he "should think fit to enter into a war against the French king, they would give him such assistance in a parliamentary way as to enable him to support and go through with the same." To this invitation from his Parliament William returned an answer of ready acquiescence, while to those about him he exclaimed, with unwonted animation, "This is the first day of my reign." FOOTNOTES: [10] There are but two ways in which a sovereign can, while alive, and _compos mentis_, become divested of his regal attributes and authority--by abdication and by deposition; and it is impossible to define abdication satisfactorily by any form of words which does not involve the idea of a _voluntary_ act. Even if a voluntary abandonment or "desertion of the Government" amounted to abdication, it would not help the case. James's flight from England in 1688 was no more voluntary than the flight of his brother, then king _de jure_, after Worcester in 1651. Both flights were taken under what was or was conceived to be _force majeure_. [11] This, however, it should be conceded, was really, of the two, a more respectable proportion; for the clergy had a sterner alternative before them than the bishops, peers, or members of the Lower House. The latter had only status at stake--the former, in most cases, their means of subsistence. CHAPTER VII 1689-1690 Invasion of Ireland--Campaign of 1689--Parliamentary strife --The conduct of the war--The Oates Case--The Succession Bill --Attempts to pass an Indemnity Bill--Rancour of the Whigs-- Their factious opposition to William's Irish plans-- Dissolution of Parliament.