But at that moment it was most important that he should carefully avoid every act which could be represented as tyrannical.

He could not venture to violate the fundamental laws of Holland at the very moment at which he was drawing the sword against his father in law for violating the fundamental laws of England.

The violent subversion of one free constitution would have been a strange prelude to the violent restoration of another.

[427] There was yet another difficulty which has been too little noticed by English writers, but which was never for a moment absent from William's mind.

In the expedition which he meditated he could succeed only by appealing to the Protestant feeling of England, and by stimulating that feeling till it became, for a time, the dominant and almost the exclusive sentiment of the nation.