The great contest which raged in England during the seventeenth century extinguished, not indeed in the body of the people, but in those classes which were most actively engaged in politics, almost all national feelings.  Charles the Second and many of his courtiers had passed a large part of their lives in banishment, living on the bounty of foreign treasuries, soliciting foreign aid to re-establish monarchy in their native country.  The King’s own brother had fought in Flanders, under the banners of Spain, against the English armies.  The oppressed Cavaliers in England constantly looked to the Louvre and the Escurial for deliverance and revenge.  Clarendon censures the continental governments with great bitterness for not interfering in our internal dissensions.  It is not strange, therefore, that, amidst the furious contests which followed the Restoration, the violence of party feeling should produce effects which would probably have attended it even in an age less distinguished by laxity of principle and indelicacy of sentiment.  It was not till a natural death had terminated the paralytic old age of the Jacobite party that the evil was completely at an end.  The Whigs long looked to Holland, the High Tories to France.  The former concluded the Barrier Treaty; the latter entreated the Court of Versailles to send an expedition to England.  Many men, who, however erroneous their political notions might be, were unquestionably honourable in private life, accepted money without scruple from the foreign powers favourable to the Pretender.

Never was there less of national feeling among the higher orders than during the reign of Charles the Second.  That Prince, on the one side, thought it better to be the deputy of an absolute king than the King of a free people.  Algernon Sydney, on the other hand, would gladly have aided France in all her ambitious schemes, and have seen England reduced to the condition of a province, in the wild hope that a foreign despot would assist him to establish his darling republic.  The King took the money of France to assist him in the enterprise which he meditated against the liberty of his subjects, with as little scruple as Frederic of Prussia or Alexander of Russia accepted our subsidies in time of war.  The leaders of the Opposition no more thought themselves disgraced by the presents of Lewis, than a gentleman of our own time thinks himself disgraced by the liberality of powerful and wealthy members of his party who pay his election bill.  The money which the King received from France had been largely employed to corrupt members of Parliament.  The enemies of the court might think it fair, or even absolutely necessary, to encounter bribery with bribery.  Thus they took the French gratuities, the needy among them for their own use, the rich probably for the general purposes of the party, without any scruple.  If we compare their conduct not with that of English statesmen in our own time, but with that of persons in those foreign countries