What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon Parliament.  Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential.  The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance.  It is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fashion in which so striking a revolution was effected.  Not, indeed, that the solution worked easily at the outset.  William remained to the end a foreigner, who could not understand the inwardness of English politics.  It was the necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England.  The Cabinet, towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental administrative instrument.  Originally a committee of the Privy Council, it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be found in its selection from a single party.  William acquiesced but doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without reference to their political affiliations.  Sunderland knew better for the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and Tories had gambled against each other for their heads.  He knew that no council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill.  There is a certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning levee at Whitehall.

What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of William than the blunder of the French monarch.  Patience, foresight and generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition of his kingship.  He had received only a half-hearted support for his foreign policy.  The army, despite his protests, had been reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland was deliberately conceived to cause him pain.  But at the very moment when his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis XIV, despite written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments of his tragic exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the Old Pretender as the rightful English king.  It was a terrible mistake.  It did for William what no action of his own could ever have achieved.  It suggested that England must receive its ruler at the hands of a foreign sovereign.  The national pride of the people rallied to the cause for which William stood.  He was king—­so, at least in contrast to