Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 19.djvu/118

106 ancestors, which were grown into disuse, because they had no need of them. All this came very short of his necessary expenses, and increased the ill humour of the people; who were growing extremely rich and luxuriant, on account of giving him nothing but extorted trifles. At length his wants obliged him to lay himself at the mercy of a saucy and inexorable house of commons, upon which he, his ministers, and his barons split at last. Surely no prince ever found himself in so forlorn and deplorable a situation as his, from the first sitting of that parliament upon his majesty, till the last sitting upon his life.

He had been long borrowing from all the world, upon the credit of dead authority, in order to give bread to a household he could not pay. All his servants, from the secretaries of state down to the scullions of his kitchen, were in an interest contrary to that of his dignity, and could never hope either for their arrears or their current wages, but by his being well with a parliament that never intended to be well with him. His honour was concerned in supporting his rights: his necessity and conscience in making away with them by degrees, in hopes that his parliament might at length be engaged, by his condescensions, to allow him wherewithal to pay his debts and defray his daily expenses. All those that served him, either in his council, or his house, or his parliament, had a personal interest in making him take this party; except those very few that were sacrificed for voting generously, and at their own cost, on the side of his honour. All the rest were bribed against his royal dignity, by their wants and their fears; and not only left him to be worried mercifully