Great Seal had been employed to sanction a piratical expedition.
The head of the law had laid down a thousand pounds in the hope
of receiving tens of thousands when his accomplices should
return, laden with the spoils of ruined merchants. It was
fortunate for the Chancellor that the calumnies of which he was
the object were too atrocious to be mischievous.

And now the time had come at which the hoarded illhumour of six
months was at liberty to explode. On the sixteenth of November
the Houses met. The King, in his speech, assured them in gracious
and affectionate language that he was determined to do his best
to merit their love by constant care to preserve their liberty
and their religion, by a pure administration of justice, by
countenancing virtue, by discouraging vice, by shrinking from no
difficulty or danger when the welfare of the nation was at stake.
"These," he said, "are my resolutions; and I am persuaded that
you are come together with purposes on your part suitable to
these on mine. Since then our aims are only for the general good,
let us act with confidence in one another, which will not fail,
by God's blessing, to make me a happy king, and you a great and
flourishing people."

It might have been thought that no words less likely to give
offence had ever been uttered from the English throne. But even
in those words the malevolence of faction sought and found matter
for a quarrel. The gentle exhortation, "Let us act with
confidence in one another," must mean that such confidence did
not now exist, that the King distrusted the Parliament, or that
the Parliament had shown an unwarrantable distrust of the King.
Such an exhortation was nothing less than a reproach; and such a