408 PARLIAMENTARY, COLBERTISM 
every session; and from being a council to look into matters 
of trade, they would be next empowered to appoint convoys 
and cruisers; this in turn might draw in the whole Admiralty 
to that part of the revenue, or supply, that was appro- 
though in priated to the navy, so that a King would soon grow to be a 
ni duke of Venice; and indeed those who set this on most 
zealously, did not deny that they designed to graft many 
things upon it. The King was so sensible of the ill effects 
this would have, that he ordered his ministers to oppose 
it as much as possibly they could?” The discovery of 
Charnock’s plot against William's life diverted public 
attention for the time, and the King, by appointing a 
permanent Board of Trade? took away much of the excuse 
there had been for the agitation in the Commons. 
Though foiled in this particular, the Commons had 
become, as a matter of fact, masters of the situation; they 
were in a position to exercise a practical control over the 
spending departments. “The government was plainly in 
the hands of the House of Commons, who must sit once 
a year, and as long as they thought fit, while the King 
had only the civil list for life, so that the whole of the 
administration was under their inspection®” By appro- 
priating the money they voted to particular objects, they 
prevented the Government from engaging in action of which 
they disapproved. The Government was so circumscribed 
that it could not attempt to fit out a man-of-war for 
Captain Kid to employ against the Madagascar pirates; 
the expedition was organised at the private expense of 
Lord Somers and others, and the conduct of the affair was 
so discreditable as to give ample cause for complaint against 
those who had undertaken to finance the project‘. 
The powers of effective criticism and practical control 
which had been secured were ultimately of immense ad- 
vantage, as they tended to purify the administrative 
corruption which had been the disgrace of the seventeenth 
century generally’. The executive power was not severed 
1 Burnet, History of his Own Time, 1v. 283. 
2 Macpherson, Annals, 11. 681 1. 
8 Burnet, op. cit. Iv. 443. + Id., op. cit. Iv. 422. 
8 Cromwell's rule appears to afford an exception, Macaulay, rr. 424. The 
government of Ireland in the eighteenth century seems to have maintained the 
A.D. 1689 
—1776.