The King, however, hesitated long before he could bring himself to quit that neutral position which he had long occupied between the contending parties.

If one of those parties was disposed to question his title, the other was on principle hostile to his prerogative.

He still remembered with bitterness the unreasonable and vindictive conduct of the Convention Parliament at the close of 1689 and the beginning of 1690; and he shrank from the thought of being entirely in the hands of the men who had obstructed the Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell clause, who had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army in Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely because he would not be their slave and their hangman.

He had once, by a bold and unexpected effort, freed himself from their yoke; and he was not inclined to put it on his neck again.

He personally disliked Wharton and Russell.