The Established Church was on the side of authority; the Dissenters stood for freedom.  “Our opponents,” said Lord John Russell, in one of his earliest speeches—­“our opponents deafen us with their cry of ‘Church and King.’  Shall I tell you what they mean by it?  They mean a Church without the Gospel and a King above the law.”  An old Radical electioneer, describing the activity of the country clergy on the Tory side, said:  “In every village we had the Black Recruiting-Sergeant against us.”  Even within sacred walls the echoes of the fight were heard.  The State Holy-days—­Gunpowder Treason, Charles the Martyr, the Restoration and the Accession—­gave suitable occasion for sermons of the most polemical vehemence.  Even the two Collects for the King at the beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory and Whig.  The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless alternative.  As in the Church, so in our educational system.  Oxford, with its Caroline and Jacobite traditions, was the Tory University; Cambridge, the nursing mother of Whigs; Eton was supposed to cherish a sentiment of romantic affection for the Stuarts; Harrow was profoundly Hanoverian.  Even the drama was involved in political antipathies, and the most enthusiastic adherents of Kean and Kemble were found respectively among the leaders of Whig and Tory Society.

The vigour, heartiness, and sincerity of this political hatred put to shame the more tepid convictions of our degenerate days.  The first Earl of Leicester, better known as “Coke of Norfolk,” told my father that when he was a child his grandfather took him on his knee and said, “Now, remember, Tom, as long as you live, never trust a Tory;” and he used to say, “I never have, and, by George, I never will.”  A little girl of Whig descent, accustomed from her cradle to hear language of this sort, asked her mother, “Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?” and her mother judiciously replied, “They are born wicked, and grow worse.”  I well remember in my youth an eccentric maiden lady—­Miss Harriet Fanny Cuyler—­who had spent a long and interesting life in the innermost circles of aristocratic Whiggery; and she always refused to enter a four-wheel cab until she had extorted from the driver his personal assurance that he never had cases of infectious disease in his cab, that he was not a Puseyite, and was a Whig.

I am bound to say that this vehement prejudice was not unnatural in a generation that remembered, either personally or by immediate tradition, the iron coercion which Pitt exercised in his later days, and which his successors continued.  The barbarous executions for high treason remain a blot on the fair fame of the nineteenth century.  Scarcely less horrible were the trials for sedition, which sent an English clergyman to transportation for life because he had signed a petition in favour of Parliamentary reform.