The Castle Inn by Stanley J. Weyman

In the year 1757 -- to go back ten years from the spring with which we are dealing -- the ordinary Englishman was a Balbus despairing of the State. No phrase was then more common on English lips, or in English ears, than the statement that the days of England's greatness were numbered, and were fast running out. Unwitting the wider sphere about to open before them, men dwelt fondly on the glories of the past. The old babbled of Marlborough's wars, of the entrance of Prince Eugene into London, of choirs draped in flags, and steeples reeling giddily for Ramillies and Blenheim. The young listened, and sighed to think that the day had been, and was not, when England gave the law to Europe, and John Churchill's warder set troops moving from Hamburg to the Alps.

On the top of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things higher than ribbon or place or pension, seemed to be dead among public men. The Tories, long deprived of power, and discredited by the taint or suspicion of Jacobitism, counted for nothing. The Whigs, agreed on all points of principle, and split into sections, the Ins and Outs, solely by the fact that all could not enjoy places and pensions at once, the supply being unequal to the demand -- had come to regard politics as purely a game; a kind of licensed hazard played for titles, orders, and emoluments, by certain families who had the _entree_ to the public table by virtue of the part they had played in settling the succession.