Crown. Every public office, every bench of justice, every
commission of Lieutenancy, was filled with Roundheads. The Tory
rectors and vicars were not less exasperated. They accused the men
in power of systematically protecting and preferring
Presbyterians, Latitudinarians, Arians, Socinians, Deists,
Atheists. An orthodox divine, a divine who held high the dignity
of the priesthood and the mystical virtue of the sacraments, who
thought schism as great a sin as theft and venerated the Icon as
much as the Gospel, had no more chance of a bishopric or a deanery
than a Papist recusant. Such complaints as these were not likely
to call forth the sympathy of the Whig malecontents. But there
were three war cries in which all the enemies of the government,
from Trenchard to Seymour, could join: No standing army; No grants
of Crown property; and No Dutchmen. Multitudes of honest
freeholders and freemen were weak enough to believe that, unless
the land force, which had already been reduced below what the
public safety required, were altogether disbanded, the nation
would be enslaved, and that, if the estates which the King had
given away were resumed, all direct taxes might be abolished. The
animosity to the Dutch mingled itself both with the animosity to
standing armies and with the animosity to Crown grants. For a
brigade of Dutch troops was part of the military establishment
which was still kept up; and it was to Dutch favourites that
William had been most liberal of the royal domains.

The elections, however, began auspiciously for the government.
The first great contest was in Westminster. It must be remembered
that Westminster was then by far the greatest city in the island,
except only the neighbouring city of London, and contained more
than three times as large a population as Bristol or Norwich,