Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 19.djvu/121

Rh closetting, favourites, and intrigues, during his former life, in order to secure his rights against the inconvenience of that religion: and after he had mounted the throne with great acclamation, he misplaced his confidence upon those that grew too hard for him at his own weapons. As he had made himself pretty easy in his domestick circumstances, by making up a little demesne of forfeited estates, he was not so entirely at the devotion of his parliament as his predecessors had been; and so began to reassume the old prerogatives of the crown, without a sufficient fund of money, or friends, or art, to make them pass upon a people that had so long looked upon themselves as masters, with a great deal of reason. He did not sink under the mutual villany of privy council and parliament, like his father; his favourites in the privy council alone were more than enough for him. Deserted by two kingdoms, and attacked by a foreign power; since he was too good natured to allow any foreign power to support him, he had nothing left but the common people of Ireland, and those remnants of catholick nobility and gentry there, who had wrested their estates, by favour or interest at court, out of the intricacies of Clarendon's act of settlement: for the infinitely greater number of Irish proprietors, though restored to their lands by the act of repeal, had been bred in so much distress and ignorance, that they could scarce be of any use to him. And so he was obliged to abandon that kingdom to its evil destiny, as the other two had abandoned him.

Now Clarendon's politicks began to have their full eflect. His posterity was seated on the throne. The republican tares had been sown so thick in the church