And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals. They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the great Whig families.