The assistance of these men was most welcome to the Tory party; but it was impossible that they could, as yet, exercise over that party the entire authority of leaders.  For they still called themselves Whigs, and generally vindicated their Tory votes by arguments grounded on Whig principles.487

From this view of the state of parties in the House of Commons, it seems clear that Sunderland had good reason for recommending that the administration should be entrusted to the Whigs.  The King, however, hesitated long before he could bring himself to quit that neutral position which he had long occupied between the contending parties.  If one of those parties was disposed to question his title, the other was on principle hostile to his prerogative.  He still remembered with bitterness the unreasonable and vindictive conduct of the Convention Parliament at the close of 1689 and the beginning of 1690; and he shrank from the thought of being entirely in the hands of the men who had obstructed the Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell clause, who had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army in Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely because he would not be their slave and their hangman.  He had once, by a bold and unexpected effort, freed himself from their yoke; and he was not inclined to put it on his neck again.  He personally disliked Wharton and Russell.  He thought highly of the capacity of Caermarthen, of the integrity of Nottingham, of the diligence and financial skill of Godolphin.  It was only by slow degrees that the arguments of Sunderland, backed by the force of circumstances, overcame all objections.

On the seventh of November 1693 the Parliament met; and the conflict of parties instantly began.  William from the throne pressed on the Houses the necessity of making a great exertion to arrest the progress of France on the Continent.  During the last campaign, he said, she had, on every point, had a superiority of force; and it had therefore been found impossible to cope with her.  His allies had promised to increase their armies; and he trusted that the Commons would enable him to do the same.488

The Commons at their next sitting took the King’s speech into consideration.  The miscarriage of the Smyrna fleet was the chief subject of discussion.  The cry for inquiry was universal:  but it was evident that the two parties raised that cry for very different reasons.  Montague spoke the sense of the Whigs.  He declared that the disasters of the summer could not, in his opinion, be explained by the ignorance and imbecility of those who had charge of the naval administration.  There must have been treason.  It was impossible to believe that Lewis, when he sent his Brest squadron to the Straits of Gibraltar, and left the whole coast of his kingdom from Dunkirk to Bayonne unprotected, had trusted merely to chance.  He must have been well assured that his fleet would meet with a vast booty under a feeble