The occasion was a very great one.  His talents, his long experience of affairs, his unspotted public character, the high posts which he had filled, seemed to mark him out as a man on whom much would depend.  He acted like himself, He saw that, if he supported the Exclusion, he made the King and the heir presumptive his enemies, and that, if he opposed it, he made himself an object of hatred to the unscrupulous and turbulent Shaftesbury.  He neither supported nor opposed it.  He quietly absented himself from the House.  Nay, he took care, he tells us, never to discuss the question in any society whatever.  Lawrence Hyde, afterwards Earl of Rochester, asked him why he did not attend in his place.  Temple replied that he acted according to Solomon’s advice, neither to oppose the mighty, nor to go about to stop the current of a river.  Hyde answered, “You are a wise and a quiet man.”  And this might be true.  But surely such wise and quiet men have no call to be members of Parliament in critical times.

A single session was quite enough for Temple.  When the Parliament was dissolved, and another summoned at Oxford, he obtained an audience of the King, and begged to know whether his Majesty wished him to continue in Parliament.  Charles, who had a singularly quick eye for the weaknesses of all who came near him, had no doubt seen through Temple, and rated the parliamentary support of so cool and guarded a friend at its proper value.  He answered good-naturedly, but we suspect a little contemptuously, “I doubt, as things stand, your coming into the House will not do much good.  I think you may as well let it alone.”  Sir William accordingly informed his constituents that he should not again apply for their suffrages, and set off for Sheen, resolving never again to meddle with public affairs.  He soon found that the King was displeased with him.  Charles, indeed, in his usual easy way, protested that he was not angry, not at all.  But in a few days he struck Temple’s name out of the list of Privy Councillors.

Why this was done Temple declares himself unable to comprehend.  But surely it hardly required his long and extensive converse with the world to teach him that there are conjunctures when men think that all who are not with them are against them, that there are conjunctures when a lukewarm friend, who will not put himself the least out of his way, who will make no exertion, who will run no risk, is more distasteful than an enemy.  Charles had hoped that the fair character of Temple would add credit to an unpopular and suspected Government.  But his Majesty soon found that this fair character resembled pieces of furniture which we have seen in the drawing-rooms of very precise old ladies, and which are a great deal too white to be used.  This exceeding niceness was altogether out of season.  Neither party wanted a man who was afraid of taking a part, of incurring abuse, of making enemies.  There were probably many good and moderate men who would have hailed the appearance of a respectable mediator.  But Temple was not a mediator.  He was merely a neutral.