instantly requested the Prince of Orange to take the government on
himself. The throne was not effectively vacant for an hour.

Your fundamental laws, as well as ours, suppose a monarchy. Your zeal,
Sir, in standing so firmly for it as you have done, shows not only a
sacred respect for your honor and fidelity, but a well-informed
attachment to the real welfare and true liberties of your country. I
have expressed myself ill, if I have given you cause to imagine that I
prefer the conduct of those who have retired from this warfare to your
behavior, who, with a courage and constancy almost supernatural, have
struggled against tyranny, and kept the field to the last. You see I
have corrected the exceptionable part in the edition which I now send
you. Indeed, in such terrible extremities as yours, it is not easy to
say, in a political view, what line of conduct is the most advisable. In
that state of things, I cannot bring myself severely to condemn persons
who are wholly unable to bear so much as the sight of those men in the
throne of legislation who are only fit to be the objects of criminal
justice. If fatigue, if disgust, if unsurmountable nausea drive them
away from such spectacles, _ubi miseriarum pars non minima erat videre
et aspici_, I cannot blame them. He must have an heart of adamant who
could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved
power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion,
treating their honest fellow-citizens as _rebels_, because they refused
to bind them selves through their conscience, against the dictates of
conscience itself, and had declined to swear an active compliance with
their own ruin. How could a man of common flesh and blood endure that
those who but the other day had skulked unobserved in their
antechambers, scornfully insulting men illustrious in their rank, sacred
in their function, and venerable in their character, now in decline of
life, and swimming on the wrecks of their fortunes,--that those