oligarchical as to be little, if at all, preferable to the worst
forms of Toryism. The young lord's imagination had been
fascinated by those swelling sentiments of liberty which abound
in the Latin poets and orators; and he, like those poets and
orators, meant by liberty something very different from the only
liberty which is of importance to the happiness of mankind. Like
them, he could see no danger to liberty except from kings. A
commonwealth, oppressed and pillaged by such men as Opimius and
Verres, was free, because it had no king. A member of the Grand
Council of Venice, who passed his whole life under tutelage and
in fear, who could not travel where he chose, or visit whom he
chose, or invest his property as he chose, whose path was beset
with spies, who saw at the corners of the streets the mouth of
bronze gaping for anonymous accusations against him, and whom the
Inquisitors of State could, at any moment, and for any or no
reason, arrest, torture, fling into the Grand Canal, was free,
because he had no king. To curtail, for the benefit of a small
privileged class, prerogatives which the Sovereign possesses and
ought to possess for the benefit of the whole nation, was the
object on which Spencer's heart was set. During many years he was
restrained by older and wiser men; and it was not till those whom
he had early been accustomed to respect had passed away, and till
he was himself at the head of affairs, that he openly attempted
to obtain for the hereditary nobility a precarious and invidious
ascendency in the State, at the expense both of the Commons and
of the Throne.

In 1695, Spencer had taken his seat in the House of Commons as
member for Tiverton, and had, during two sessions, conducted
himself as a steady and zealous Whig.