many years, excluded from public employment, must necessarily be
incompetent to take on themselves at once the whole management of
affairs. Experience doubtless had its value: but surely the first
of all the qualifications of a servant was fidelity; and no Tory
could be a really faithful servant of the new government. If King
William were wise, he would rather trust novices zealous for his
interest and honour than veterans who might indeed possess
ability and knowledge, but who would use that ability and that
knowledge to effect his ruin.

The Tories, on the other hand, complained that their share of
power bore no proportion to their number and their weight in the
country, and that every where old and useful public servants
were, for the crime of being friends to monarchy and to the
Church, turned out of their posts to make way for Rye House
plotters and haunters of conventicles. These upstarts, adepts in
the art of factious agitation, but ignorant of all that belonged
to their new calling, would be just beginning to learn their
business when they had undone the nation by their blunders. To be
a rebel and a schismatic was surely not all that ought to be
required of a man in high employment. What would become of the
finances, what of the marine, if Whigs who could not understand
the plainest balance sheet were to manage the revenue, and Whigs
who had never walked over a dockyard to fit out the fleet.75

The truth is that the charges which the two parties brought
against each other were, to a great extent, well founded, but
that the blame which both threw on William was unjust. Official
experience was to be found almost exclusively among the Tories,
hearty attachment to the new settlement almost exclusively among