In the reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which had agitated England since the Norman conquest seemed to be set at rest.  The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had terminated.  The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler and Cade had disappeared.  Villanage was scarcely known.  The two royal houses, whose conflicting claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were at length united.  The claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had disturbed the new settlement, were overthrown.  In religion there was no open dissent, and probably very little secret heresy.  The old subjects of contention, in short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had not yet appeared.

Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles which were destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of commotion.  The Reformation divided the people into two great parties.  The Protestants were victorious.  They again subdivided themselves.  Political factions were engrafted on theological sects.  The mutual animosities of the two parties gradually emerged into the light of public life.  First came conflicts in Parliament; then civil war; then revolutions upon revolutions, each attended by its appurtenance of proscriptions, and persecutions, and tests; each followed by severe measures on the part of the conquerors; each exciting a deadly and festering hatred in the conquered.  During the reign of George the Second, things were evidently tending to repose.  At the close of that reign, the nation had completed the great revolution which commenced in the early part of the sixteenth century, and was again at rest, The fury of sects had died away.  The Catholics themselves practically enjoyed toleration; and more than toleration they did not yet venture even to desire.  Jacobitism was a mere name.  Nobody was left to fight for that wretched cause, and very few to drink for it.  The Constitution, purchased so dearly, was on every side extolled and worshipped.  Even those distinctions of party which must almost always be found in a free state could scarcely be traced.  The two great bodies which, from the time of the Revolution, had been gradually tending to approximation, were now united in emulous support of that splendid Administration which smote to the dust both the branches of the House of Bourbon.  The great battle for our ecclesiastical and civil polity had been fought and won.  The wounds had been healed.  The victors and the vanquished were rejoicing together.  Every person acquainted with the political writers of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally speak of that time.  It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow.