The English High Church party did not adopt these legends.  But truth and honor, as they thought, bound them to the exiled king’s side; nor had the banished family any warmer supporter than that kind lady of Castlewood, in whose house Esmond was brought up.  She influenced her husband, very much more perhaps than my lord knew, who admired his wife prodigiously though he might be inconstant to her, and who, adverse to the trouble of thinking himself, gladly enough adopted the opinions which she chose for him.  To one of her simple and faithful heart, allegiance to any sovereign but the one was impossible.  To serve King William for interest’s sake would have been a monstrous hypocrisy and treason.  Her pure conscience could no more have consented to it than to a theft, a forgery, or any other base action.  Lord Castlewood might have been won over, no doubt, but his wife never could:  and he submitted his conscience to hers in this case as he did in most others, when he was not tempted too sorely.  And it was from his affection and gratitude most likely, and from that eager devotion for his mistress, which characterized all Esmond’s youth, that the young man subscribed to this, and other articles of faith, which his fond benefactress set him.  Had she been a Whig, he had been one; had she followed Mr. Fox, and turned Quaker, no doubt he would have abjured ruffles and a periwig, and have forsworn swords, lace-coats, and clocked stockings.  In the scholars’ boyish disputes at the University, where parties ran very high, Esmond was noted as a Jacobite, and very likely from vanity as much as affection took the side of his family.

Almost the whole of the clergy of the country and more than a half of the nation were on this side.  Ours is the most loyal people in the world surely; we admire our kings, and are faithful to them long after they have ceased to be true to us.  ’Tis a wonder to any one who looks back at the history of the Stuart family to think how they kicked their crowns away from them; how they flung away chances after chances; what treasures of loyalty they dissipated, and how fatally they were bent on consummating their own ruin.  If ever men had fidelity, ’twas they; if ever men squandered opportunity, ’twas they; and, of all the enemies they had, they themselves were the most fatal.

When the Princess Anne succeeded, the wearied nation was glad enough to cry a truce from all these wars, controversies, and conspiracies, and to accept in the person of a Princess of the blood royal a compromise between the parties into which the country was divided.  The Tories could serve under her with easy consciences; though a Tory herself, she represented the triumph of the Whig opinion.  The people of England, always liking that their Princes should be attached to their own families, were pleased to think the Princess was faithful to hers; and up to the very last day and hour of her reign, and but for that fatality which he inherited from his fathers along with their claims