But it is vain to expect that men who are inflamed by anger, who are suffering distress, and who fancy that it is in their power to obtain immediate relief from their distresses at the expense of those who have excited their anger, will reason as calmly as the historian who, biassed neither by interest nor passion, reviews the events of a past age.  The public burdens were heavy.  To whatever extent the grants of royal domains were revoked, those burdens would be lightened.  Some of the recent grants had undoubtedly been profuse.  Some of the living grantees were unpopular.  A cry was raised which soon became formidably loud.  All the Tories, all the malecontent Whigs, and multitudes who, without being either Tories or malecontent Whigs, disliked taxes and disliked Dutchmen, called for a resumption of all the Crown property which King William had, as it was phrased, been deceived into giving away.

On the seventh of February 1698, this subject, destined to irritate the public mind at intervals during many years, was brought under the consideration of the House of Commons.  The opposition asked leave to bring in a bill vacating all grants of Crown property which had been made since the Revolution.  The ministers were in a great strait; the public feeling was strong; a general election was approaching; it was dangerous and it would probably be vain to encounter the prevailing sentiment directly.  But the shock which could not be resisted might be eluded.  The ministry accordingly professed to find no fault with the proposed bill, except that it did not go far enough, and moved for leave to bring in two more bills, one for annulling the grants of James the Second, the other for annulling the grants of Charles the Second.  The Tories were caught in their own snare.  For most of the grants of Charles and James had been made to Tories; and a resumption of those grants would have reduced some of the chiefs of the Tory party to poverty.  Yet it was impossible to draw a distinction between the grants of William and those of his two predecessors.  Nobody could pretend that the law had been altered since his accession.  If, therefore, the grants of the Stuarts were legal, so were his; if his grants were illegal, so were the grants of his uncles.  And, if both his grants and the grants of his uncles were illegal, it was absurd to say that the mere lapse of time made a difference.  For not only was it part of the alphabet of the law that there was no prescription against the Crown, but the thirty-eight years which had elapsed since the Restoration would not have sufficed to bar a writ of right brought by a private demandant against a wrongful tenant.  Nor could it be pretended that William had bestowed his favours less judiciously than Charles and James.  Those who were least friendly to the Dutch would hardly venture to say that Portland, Zulestein and Ginkell was less deserving of the royal bounty than the Duchess of Cleveland and the Duchess of Portsmouth, than the