and that Montague demanded too much.  At last, on the fourteenth of January, a vote was taken for three hundred and fifty thousand pounds.  Four days later the House resolved to grant half-pay to the disbanded officers till they should be otherwise provided for.  The half-pay was meant to be a retainer as well as a reward.  The effect of this important vote therefore was that, whenever a new war should break out, the nation would be able to command the services of many gentlemen of great military experience.  The ministry afterwards succeeded in obtaining, much against the will of a portion of the opposition, a separate vote for three thousand marines.

A Mutiny Act, which had been passed in 1697, expired in the spring of 1698.  As yet no such Act had been passed except in time of war; and the temper of the Parliament and of the nation was such that the ministers did not venture to ask, in time of peace, for a renewal of powers unknown to the constitution.  For the present, therefore, the soldier was again, as in the times which preceded the Revolution, subject to exactly the same law which governed the citizen.

It was only in matters relating to the army that the government found the Commons unmanageable.  Liberal provision was made for the navy.  The number of seamen was fixed at ten thousand, a great force, according to the notions of that age, for a time of peace.  The funds assigned some years before for the support of the civil list had fallen short of the estimate.  It was resolved that a new arrangement should be made, and that a certain income should be settled on the King.  The amount was fixed, by an unanimous vote, at seven hundred thousand pounds; and the Commons declared that, by making this ample provision for his comfort and dignity, they meant to express their sense of the great things which he had done for the country.  It is probable, however, that so large a sum would not have been given without debates and divisions, had it not been understood that he meant to take on himself the charge of the Duke of Gloucester’s establishment, and that he would in all probability have to pay fifty thousand pounds a year to Mary of Modena.  The Tories were unwilling to disoblige the Princess of Denmark; and the Jacobites abstained from offering any opposition to a grant in the benefit of which they hoped that the banished family would participate.

It was not merely by pecuniary liberality that the Parliament testified attachment to the Sovereign.  A bill was rapidly passed which withheld the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act, during twelve months more, from Bernardi and some other conspirators who had been concerned in the Assassination Plot, but whose guilt, though demonstrated to the conviction of every reasonable man, could not be proved by two witnesses.  At the same time new securities were provided against a new danger which threatened the government.  The peace had put an end to the apprehension that the throne of William might be subverted by foreign