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HISTORY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 COUNTER - REVOLUTION 
 
 IN ENGLAND, 
 
 Jfor tf)c $U?tgta%ltgf)ment of SPopcrg, 
 
 UNDER CHARLES II. AND JAMES II. 
 
 ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. C. J. FOX. 
 
 LONDON: 
 DAVID BOGUE, FLEET STREET. 
 
 MDCCCXLVI. 
 

MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 Ox tlie 2Gth of March, IS'23, a young man of twenty-three stealthily 
 embarked at Marseilles iu a Spanish fishing vessel bound for Barcelona ; 
 but the evening before, he had worn the epaulette of sub-lieutenant of the 
 ^ n th regiment of the line. Somewhat compromised in the opinion of his 
 -eriors by his liberal opinions, he had been ordered to remain at the 
 ot at Aix, while his regiment was sent to share in the expedition di- 
 ced by the government of the elder branch of the Bourbons against the 
 .mish revolution. The young officer, thirsting for action, had vainly 
 tested against the order which condemned him to repose ; having re- 
 ved as an only reply, a threat of dismissal, he decided upon sending in 
 ; resignation, and thus restored to liberty, precluded from fighting in the 
 ^ .ench ranks, and, moreover, drawn by his opinions to the cause of the 
 Spanish constitutionalists, he departed, all joyous, unknown to his parents 
 or friends, to place his sword and his life at the service of that cause. 
 
 On his arrival at Barcelona, he found the town filled with refugees from 
 all nations, mostly old soldiers of the empire, attracted to Spain by the 
 love of war, the taste for adventure, and the hope of revenge upon the 
 white flag. While other refugees, encamped upon the banks of the Bi- 
 dassoa, vainly endeavoured to gain over the army of the Bourbons by waving 
 the tri-coloured flag before their eyes, the French assembled at Bar- 
 celona, formed themselves into a battalion, called the battalion of Napo- 
 leon II., clothed in the uniform of the old guard, and marching under the 
 imperial eagle. Soon reduced in numbers by the rapid successes of the 
 army of invasion, this French battalion was organized, with the other 
 foreign companies, into a single corps, which, under the name of the 
 Foreign liberalist legion, formed a battalion of infantry, and a small 
 squadron of lancers. Many companies of it were composed entirely of 
 officers ; there were two generals in the ranks carrying the lance ; one 
 half of them were Frenchmen, and the rest had served in the Imperial 
 armies. The uniform and colours were those of the empire ; a brilliant 
 and gallant officer, colonel Pachioretti, had organized this legion, and com- 
 manded it. It was under him that for many months were seen men, col- 
 lected from all parts of Europe, almost all old soldiers of the great captain 
 come to a strange country to defend a cause which they looked upon as 
 their own, rallied under the ascendancy of a loftv mind, marching where it 
 
VI MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 led them, suffering and fighting without the hope of praise or in any way- 
 changing, do what they might, the desperate state of their cause ; having 
 no other prospect before them but that of a miserable end amidst a country 
 in arms against them, or death in the court-yard as prisoners, if they 
 escaped that of the battle-field. 
 
 It was in this rude school of strife and misery, in this campaign of Cata- 
 lonia, of which he was one day to be the eloquent historian, that the young 
 officer from Marseilles fought his first fight, with a bravery and a talent 
 worthy a better fate ; for the Foreign liberalist legion, ill seconded by the 
 Spanish troops, after having been decimated in numerous encounters, was 
 at length overwhelmed before Figuiéres, after a combat of two days, the 
 fierce determination of which proved that they were Frenchmen who fought 
 on either side. On the third day, the small foreign phalanx, diminished by 
 two-thirds, but resolved to die weapon in hand rather than incur the pun- 
 ishment reserved by the French laws for most of the survivors, prepared to 
 fight till the death of the last man, when general baron de Damas proposed 
 a capitulation, by which he granted the ordinary conditions to the Spaniards 
 and other foreigners, and pledged himself to obtain the pardon of the French 
 refugees. 
 
 This capitulation, the terms of which w r ere afterwards contested by the 
 refugees, was not fully ratified by the government of the restoration, at 
 least, not as to the latter, for immediately that, re-entering France, wearing 
 their swords and uniforms, they appeared at Perpignan, they were seized 
 and carried before councils of war. M. de Damas, whose guarantee they 
 appealed to, declared that he had engaged only to obtain their life from the 
 king's mercy, but not to protect them from the condemnation which they 
 might incur for having borne arms against France. 
 
 Most of them refused to admit of any modification of the convention of 
 Figuiéres, and among the most determined in demanding the honourable 
 fulfilment of a capitulation of which he was denied the security, the young 
 officer in question was chiefly distinguished. The idea of being regarded 
 by military judges as a deserter taken in arms, and who had surrendered at 
 discretion, was odious to him ; and rather than place himself at the royal 
 mercy, he preferred, despite the remonstrances of his family, to take the 
 chance of a judicial struggle, which, in case of failure, would endanger his 
 position. 
 
 Twice condemned to death at Perpignan, he contrived tc have those two 
 sentences annulled for defects of form ; brought before a third council of 
 war at Toulouse, he was ably defended by the celebrated advocate, 
 Romiguières. The passions which had given birth to the war in Spain 
 were already somewhat calmed ; the bravery, the youth, the noble and open 
 physiognomy of the accused, some earnest and touching expressions which 
 he himself delivered in his defence, all moved the hearts of the judges ; and 
 upon the simple proof of the existence of the capitulation, he was acquitted 
 by a majority of six to one, and re-entered society, not as a pardoned 
 criminal, but as a conquered soldier, who had owed his life to his sword 
 alone. 
 
 However, that sword was now broken; the military career, which he 
 had embraced from taste, was for ever closed to the young sub-lieutenant, 
 but Fortune reserved brilliant compensation for him. 
 
 But a few years, and this obscure officer, changing his sword for a pen, 
 
MEMOIR OP ARMAND CARREL. Vil 
 
 was to achieve with that pen, which he wielded like a sword, the rank of 
 general in chief of the grand army of journalists, that most undisciplined 
 army of all that ever existed, numbering as many generals as it does 
 soldiers. Again, a few years, and aided by a revolution, this sub-lieutenant 
 was to become, both in the eyes of his adversaries and of his Mends, the 
 loftiest, the most brilliant personification of the political press of France ; 
 and yet again a few years, and the bloody and premature death of this sim- 
 ple journalist, unhappily too adherent to the manners of the soldier, was to 
 produce in France and in Europe a sensation as vivid as that produced by 
 the death of a powerful king. Thirty thousand persons of every rank 
 were to escort his remains to his grave, and men were to see the greatest 
 literary genius of our age, the statesman who, from his cabinet, gave motion, 
 in 1823, to the army of Spain, the most illustrious of the emigrants of the 
 white flag, weeping over the tomb of the bravest emigrant of the tri-coloured 
 flag. 
 
 Jean Baptiste Nicolas Armand Carrel was born at Eouen, on the 8th 
 of May, 1800, of a mercantile family; after having partly gone through his 
 classical studies in the college of that city, he obtained his father's permis- 
 sion to follow the inclination winch drew him to a military career, and he 
 entered the school of Saint Cyr. 
 
 " At Saint Cyr," says M. Littré, " he distinguished himself by his taste for military 
 exercises and the boldness of his political opinions. He was looked upon, from the out- 
 set, as an ill-affected person, and was consequently kept under close surveillance, and 
 even persecuted by the superior general, d'Albignac. One day, the general having said 
 to him that, with opinions like his, he should take to the yard measure at his father's 
 counter : " General," answered Carrel, " if I do take it up, it will not be to measure 
 cloth with it." This daring reply occasioned his arrest, and there was a question even 
 of expelling him. But Carrel wrote direct to the minister of war, explained the facts to 
 him, and completely gained his cause. Caring little for the studies which might make 
 him attain a first rank as an officer, Carrel paid indifferent attention to mathematics, 
 but much to literature, and as his compositions were solely narratives of battles and 
 military harangues, he left his fellow-pupils far behind him, as well by the purity and 
 precision of his style, as by the bold ideas which he made such admirable use of when 
 peculiar energy was required." 
 
 Having, in 1821, entered, as sub-lieutenant, the 29th regiment of the 
 line, then in garrison at Béfort and IS. euf-Brisach, he had some share in the 
 military conspiracy known as the conspiracy of Béfort; but, fortunately for 
 him, his complicity escaped the investigations of the police. 
 
 Being with his regiment at Versailles, he wrote, as his début in the career 
 of journalism, a letter to the Spanish cortes, which procured him, from 
 general de Damas, general of his division, a paternal admonition, and doubt- 
 less contributed to his being left at the depot at the time of the expedi- 
 tion. 
 
 We have seen how he indemnified himself for the inactivity sought to be 
 imposed upon him, and how his campaign in Catalonia brought him before 
 the councils of war. 
 
 After his last acquittal, and his release from the prison of Toulouse, he 
 came, in September, 1824, to Paris, where he found himself, without resources, 
 without profession, under the displeasure of his family, and pressed to adopt 
 some profession instead of that'he had lost. He first thought of studying 
 the law, w r ith a view to the bar, but he had entered Saint Cyr before taking 
 a degree in philosophy, and had not, accordingly, the diploma of bachelor, 
 without which he could not enter. Although, during his garrison life, and 
 
Vlll MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 his long sojourn in the prisons of Perpignan and Toulouse, he had read and 
 written much for his own private instruction, it did not at first occur to him 
 to attempt the literary career : his family wished him to devote himself to 
 commerce. 
 
 M. Isambert, who had been his counsel in his appeals, gave him letters of 
 introduction to M. Girardin and M. Lafitte, it being in contemplation to 
 place him in a banking house, but these various steps led to nothing, and the 
 young Carrel already began to discover that it was more difficult to gain a 
 livelihood at Paris than to make war in Catalonia, when one of his friends, 
 M.Arnold Scheffer, proposed him as secretary to M.Augustin Thierry, who 
 was then completing his Histoire de la Conquête d Angleterre par les Nor- 
 mans, and whose already failing sight required the eyes of an intelligent and 
 active colleague. 
 
 The illustrious historian offered him a salary equal to his late pay; and, 
 to remove all idea of subordinancy, which would have been painful to so 
 proud a soul, he exhibited to him his task, as that of a man selected to as- 
 sist in his historical researches, adding : " This work will oiler little to 
 amuse, but some instruction may, perhaps, be derived from it." A post 
 offered with so much delicacy was accepted with eager gladness. 
 
 " The department assigned to Carrel, when installed with M. Thierry, consisted," 
 says M. Msard, "in making researches, arranging, putting notes in order, and correcting 
 proofs of the Histoire de la Conquête. These labours, and others of the same kind, are dry 
 and subaltern only in common hands ; a superior mind finds therein materials whereon 
 to display his sagacity and his taste. Carrel, from the first, showed in this work such 
 high qualities, that in a short time the line of demarcation between the secretary and the 
 accomplished author was gradually effaced. M. Thierry, with that noble modesty which 
 distinguishes him, fully acknowledges all that his last volume of the Histoire de la Con- 
 quête owed to the co-operation of Carrel. Six months passed away thus; Carrel had 
 not yet written anything on his own account. A bookseller having asked M. Thierry to 
 draw up a summary of the history of Scotland, Thierry, who could scarcely accomplish 
 the labours he already had in hand, engaged Carrel to undertake it. Carrel applied 
 himself to the work, and drew up, aided by the Histoire de la Conquête, a brief and effec- 
 tive summary, to which, for the purposes of the bookseller, M. Thierry wrote an intro- 
 duction. The work was so successful that Carrel refused any further salary from M. 
 Thierry. The latter would not, at first, consent to this ; but Carrel insisting, it was 
 agreed that he should receive it for three months longer, after which he should be 
 entirely at his own disposition. In the interval, Carrel's mother made a journey to 
 Paris. M. Thierry's letters had not satisfied her. Her idea of the position of a man 'of 
 letters was by no means flattering. It was necessary for M. Thierry to renew emphatically 
 his first assurances, and himself, as it were, to guarantee the literary talent, and the 
 consequent future success in life, of her son. At two dinners to which she invited 
 M. Thierry, she eagerly questioned him upon this subject. ' You think then, Monsieur, 
 that my son will get on, and that he will make his way well ?' ' I answer for him as 
 for myself,' said M. Thierry. ' I have had some experience in literary matters ; your 
 son has all the qualities which ensure success in the present day. . . The young 
 man listened in silence, respectful, submissive, and, as M. Thierry relates, almost timid, 
 in the presence of his mother, whose decision and firmness of mind had great influence 
 over him. Carrel here only bowed before his own qualities ; for what he respected 
 in his mother was simply that which, at a later period, was to make himself respected 
 as a public man." 
 
 Meantime, the success promised to Carrel in the career of literature was 
 slow in coming. After having left M. Thierry, he published, by his ad- 
 vice, a new Resume de l'Histoire de la Grèce Moderne. The very moderate 
 produce of these two first works enabled Carrel for a short time to enjoy 
 independence ; but his purse was soon exhausted. He was obliged to seek 
 a livelihood by the precarious occupation of a subaltern press-writer, taking 
 
MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 IX 
 
 about to the various journals and reviews articles sometimes refused — some- 
 times forgotten in the editor's portfolio. This melancholy existence, which 
 would have been insupportable for Carrel, had he not had, in his soldierly 
 tenaciousness, a means always at hand to secure him from the insolence or 
 disdain of the more fortunate, lasted several months, and his pecuniary 
 difficulties became such that he was obliged again to think of commerce. 
 
 "He selected," says M. Nisard, "that of books, as least separating him from his 
 literary habits, A request for capital was made to his family, who sent him the 
 means of estabhshing, in partnership with a friend, a modest bookseller's shop, which 
 did not exist long enough to ruin any one. The capital alone was lost, at least so 
 much of it as had not been applied to the support of Carrel for several months. It 
 was here, in the back-shop, upon a counter,* to which a large Newfoundland dog was 
 chained, that Carrel, sometimes immured in English political collections, sometimes 
 caressing his favourite dog, meditated and wrote the Histoire de la contre-révolution 
 en Angleterre. This book appeared in February 1827." 
 
 In this work, the first he had written from taste rather than to the order 
 of some bookseller, Carrel infused enough of himself to enable us in read- 
 ing it to form an idea of the state of his mind when he composed it ; but it 
 was not until a year later, in 1828, in two long articles upon the war in 
 Spain, published in the Revue Français, that Carrel, called upon to speak 
 of things and men whom he had himself seen, to describe feelings and pas- 
 sions which he had shared or combated, fully manifested himself to the 
 public with all his distinguishing attributes, that firm and decided bearing, 
 that manner, so unflinching, yet so unassuming, because so undoubting of 
 itself, that style, so skilful a combination of vivid colouring and close pre- 
 cision, of elegance, clearness, and vigour, which gave such admirable relief 
 to his writings. 
 
 The narrative is not only distinguished by the severe beauty of form, the 
 uprightness, the loftiness, of its ideas ; it is stamped with a character of jus- 
 tice and impartiality very remarkable in a soldier, but which did not always 
 protect Carrel from yielding to the excitement of daily polemics. 
 
 Shortly afterwards, the establishment of the National, the first number of 
 which appeared on the 1st of January, 1800, opened to Carrol the arena in 
 which he was to experience all the delight, all the ardour, all the intoxica- 
 tion, all the triumphs, and all the dangers, of the field of battle. United, 
 at this time, by the ties of friendship and of similar opinions, with MM. 
 Thiers and Mignet, he founded, in concert with them, and with the support of 
 the chiefs of the extreme liberal opposition, that paper which was destined 
 to bring about in France a revolution of 1688. 
 
 M. Littré here speaks, without any proof beyond the assertion itself, of a 
 radical difference of opinion, which, from the outset, divided M. Thiers 
 and Carrel ; he alleges that the views of Carrel already went much farther 
 than the substitution of one dynasty for another ; and he adds, that, accord- 
 ingly, his co-operation in the National was limited, and almost confined to 
 a few literary criticisms. 
 
 It is true that Carrel — at first occupying the third rank in the direction of 
 the National, according to an arrangement concluded between its three 
 originators, in pursuance of which each of them by turns was to have the 
 supreme direction of the paper for one year, a direction given first to M. 
 
 * This counter, which is merely a rough table, was bought by M. de Chateaubriand 
 at the sale of Carrel's furniture. 
 
X iMEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 Thiers, and which was next to devolve upon M, Mignet — it is true that 
 Carrel, in his consciousness of his own worth, ill enduring to he eclipsed by 
 his two colleagues, whose literary and political position was then superior 
 to his own, kept himself somewhat aloof during this first period of the 
 National. An article upon the death of Alphonze Kabbe, another, and a very 
 touching one, upon the suicide of young Sautelet, acting editor of the new 
 paper, an essay upon the life and writings of Paul Louis Courrier, and two 
 curious and striking articles against the dramas of the romantic school, for 
 which Carrel had never any taste, were almost the only indications of his 
 co-operation in the National, from January to July, 1830. But, to attribute 
 this reserve, on the part of Carrel, to a fundamental difference of opinion as 
 to the direction of the journal, is to render it impossible to explain how and 
 why Carrel, when sole director of the National after the revolution of July, 
 conducted it almost exactly on the same principle as that pursued by M. 
 Thiers. If Carrel had, ever since the restoration, been so deeply per- 
 vaded with republican views, how could he so long have defended the 
 monarchy of July against its adversaries of every grade, and waited so long 
 ere he passed into their ranks. 
 
 Carrel was still in that position of uneasiness and unsatisfied ambition, 
 when the ordinances of July appeared : they found him prepared for resis- 
 tance, but, like many others, little confident in its efficacy. On the 26th of 
 July, in a supplement to the National, distributed at mid-day, and containing 
 the ordinances, he himself wrote the first appeal to the individual energy of 
 the citizens ; the following day he signed the general protest of the jour- 
 nalists, drawn up by M. Thiers, and likewise emanating from the National ; 
 and then, when the firing was going on between the people and the troops, 
 he was seen, according to M. Louis Blanc, wandering about the streets, 
 without arms, a black stick in his hand, braving death without seeking 
 success, and incessantly asking his more confident friends : " Have you 
 only a single battalion?" His own recollections, and perhaps his pro- 
 fessional pride as ex-lieutenant, prevented him from believing in the possi- 
 bility of a victory by the populace over regiments. 
 
 On the 30th of July, while MM. Thiers and Mignet were labouring to 
 secure the success of the royal candidateship of the duke of Orleans, Carrel 
 was charged by M. Laffitte to take the command of the column of Bouenese 
 National guard, which had hastened to the succour of the Parisians. 
 
 During the first days of the installation of the new government, he was 
 sent on a mission into the departments of the west, for the purpose of re- 
 organizing the administration there ; he zealously acquitted himself of this 
 task, changing or retaining the mayors and sub-prefects according to the con- 
 viction he acquired of their attachment to the new order of things. Finding 
 himself indirectly disavowed by'some of the measures of the new government, 
 he returned to Paris at the latter end of August; he there found his friends 
 of the National already installed in power. With regard to him, he was, 
 without being consulted, nominated prefect of Cantal. Considering a pre- 
 fecture of the third class as below his claims, he refused it, and now occu- 
 pied himself solely with regaining possession of the National, to which 
 some difficulties, which he attributed to M. Thiers, opposed themselves. 
 
 During his absence, M. Thiers, quitting the National, had caused its 
 direction to be confided to M. Passy. Can*el asserted his own rights, and 
 after some discussion, attained them : and the National of the 29th of 
 
MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. XI 
 
 August, 1830, appeared with the notification : " That MM. Thiers and 
 Mignet having entered into office, the paper would thenceforth be conducted 
 under the sole direction of M. Carrel." 
 
 If there was needed a proof that republicanism and war, which people 
 have so frequently attempted à posteriori to identify with the spirit of the 
 revolution of July, are two tendencies which were not contained in that 
 great political fact, and were only joined to it as it were by supererogation, 
 and at a subsequent date, that proof is given in the manner in which Carrel, 
 already personally dissatisfied with the new power, and consequently 
 having no reason to spare it, at first directed the National. 
 
 As to the change of Carrel's views from monarchy to republicanism, it is 
 incorrect to represent it as one of those sudden transformations which are 
 brought about from one day to another, under the imperious and exclusive in- 
 fluence of wounded self-love and disappointed ambition. From the first few 
 months following the revolution of July, during which Carrel so energetically 
 pronouncedfor monarchy against a republic, until the month of January, 1832, 
 when he as it were officially unfurled the republican banner in his paper, he 
 was seen to arrive progressively, and by a series of marked gradations, from 
 a state of friendship to a state of hostility ; and yet, although the only ques- 
 tion was a difference with regard to the means of applying the principle, in 
 which Carrel never changed, namely, the government of the country by the 
 country, the self-government, which was always his motto ; still, having 
 before them the fact of so distinct an adhesion to the revolution of 1830, 
 in the outset, people naturally asked how Carrel could have been led so 
 quickly to despair of an institution which he at first considered the best 
 safeguard against anarchy, and the most complete expression of the wishes 
 and wants of France. 
 
 I do not think it a failure of respect to the memory of this honourable 
 writer to attribute this change to the combined influence of two different 
 causes : first, doubtlessly, to a sincere conviction of an increasing want of 
 harmony between the progress of the new government and what he believed 
 to be the will of the country ; to a sincere conviction of the impossibility 
 that monarchy could face the internal and external crisis, as to the danger 
 and importance of which he was deceived, like many others ; and to the 
 conviction, consequently, of the necessity of preparing a more vigorous 
 government to meet a more dangerous position. But, this point admitted, 
 it were, I think, false to justice and to paint a mere fancy portrait, 
 not to admit also that ambition had something to do with the new creed 
 of Carrel, the legitimate ambition of a powerful mind which deems 
 itself called to the exercise of power, and feels a natural inclination 
 to condemn as inefficient the power which rejects its aid. And without 
 taking too literally the expression which Carrel made use of with a scornful 
 sneer : " Who knows but they might have had me. if they'd offered me a 
 regiment," it is a permissible supposition that if, in the outset, when he was 
 yet free and sympathised with the new government, he had been offered, 
 instead of a third-class prefecture, a situation more worthy of his activity, 
 and less inferior to that of his old colleagues of the National, he might, 
 connected more intimately with the new order of things, have separated 
 from it with greater hesitation ; and that even, when the progress of affairs 
 displeasing him obliged him to pass over to the opposition, he would 
 have there supported the constitutional monarchy which he so brilliantly 
 defended for many months. 
 
Xll MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 What is quite certain, is that Carrel was not at all a man of faction — not 
 one of those turbulent and restless minds, for whom any revolution is not 
 complete until it has made authority a mere matter of brute force and of 
 lungs— a premium to those who are best supplied with that quality so 
 highly praised by Danton : " Audacity ! audacity ! audacity !" 
 
 Carrel was certainly not deficient in daring — indeed, he may, perhaps, be 
 accused of having had too much ; but he had also qualities far higher than 
 audacity. To a great strength of soul he joined, without speaking here of 
 the honour and the nobleness of his heart — a thorough justness and recti- 
 tude of mind ; and it was this which rendered him essentially a man of 
 government ; it was this which rendered him wholly out of his place 
 amidst the anarchical and incoherent mass into which he had been thrown 
 by the hope of filling a great, a noble part, and which he had in vain 
 laboured to organize, to prepare, not only for the attack upon, and the con 
 quest of, but for the exercise of power : thus, from the day on which he 
 unfurled the republican banner, his life was nothing but a twofold and per- 
 petual combat — almost as vivid, almost as obstinate against the indiscipline 
 of his own party as against the skill of his adversaries. If, on the one 
 hand, as impetuous as determined in attack, and ever ready to risk his own 
 life for the honour of his cause in braving individual danger, he knew how 
 to excite and give enthusiasm, by his devotion, and courage, to the most 
 intelligent and distinguished portion of his party ; on the other hand, in his 
 noble horror for all demagogue violence, in his superior good sense, in his 
 proud disdain for all quackery in language and action, for that sanguinary and 
 crude pathos which then won the honours of populace popularity, he pre- 
 sented something essentially the reverse of that fierce and feverish trickster- 
 ing, that systematic brutality, which has so greatly facilitated the triumph 
 of the monarchy of July over the republican party. 
 
 Bejecting each recourse to arms as injurious to the republican cause, and 
 only revenging himself for not being listened to by the noble promptitude 
 with which he always placed himself, after the defeat of his party, between 
 the government and the conquered ; persuaded that power accrues to none 
 but only to those who have qualified themselves to exercise it, he in- 
 cessantly urged upon his party the necessity of first forming opinions for 
 itself, and of converting the country instead of forcing it. 
 
 Labouring with active solicitude to maintain the rights of liberty and of 
 property, so grossly trampled under foot by the extreme men of the party, 
 he sought to persuade the bourgeoisie that the republic was limited simply to 
 the transmutation of hereditary power into an elective power, with an exten- 
 sion of the right of suffrage ; energetically repelling the brutal theories*of la 
 Société des Dibits de l'Homme and of La Tribune, efforts of his which, on the 
 part of the grotesque disciples of Marat, brought upon him the accusation 
 of being only a scoundrellij moderate, an aristocrat worthy of figuring à la 
 lanterne, by the side of Lafayette. 
 
 There is in the " Mémoires de M. Gisquet," a confidential letter from 
 Carrel to M. Petetin, curious from the revelations it contains as to the 
 internal anarchy which was undermining the republican party. We there 
 see how M. Marats, the editor of the Tribune, was forced to fight a duel 
 with a more extreme Jacobin than himself, who accused him of treason for 
 having contented himself with calling Lafayette a great culprit. 
 
 His detestation of this savage quackery was unconquerable. When a 
 
MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 Xlll 
 
 prisoner at Sainte Pélagie for libel, (January, 1835.) and called upon by 
 his fellow-prisoners to illuminate, like tliem, the windows of his chamber, in 
 celebration of the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI., he refused to 
 do so. Hereupon the whole party rushed to his chamber, shouting: " Down 
 with the yellow gloves ! down with my lord ! Let's hang him !" And, 
 according to M. Gisquet, it required the intervention of the officers and 
 soldiers to preserve from the insults of these furies him who was their chief, 
 as much by talent as by courage, and whose name was esteemed and respected 
 by his adversaries themselves. 
 
 Despite all these mortifications, and although Carrel could not conceal 
 from himself that the party which he had thought to call to the govern- 
 ment of France was falling daily into greater discredit, he remained in the 
 breach ; and when, after excesses of violence and rashness, there appeared 
 symptoms of debility and discouragement, when, repeatedly vanquished in 
 parliament, before the courts of justice, and in the streets, mortally 
 wounded in its most furious organs by numerous condemnations, and on 
 all sides entangled in a net-work of repressive laws, republican opinion 
 seemed to yield to the conviction of its powerlessness, we see him who had 
 preached prudence to the rash and reason to the senseless, endeavouring 
 with equal firmness to encourage hope, perseverance, and ardour in the 
 breast of a demoralized party, to cover it as with a buckler, with the general 
 esteem which his character inspired, and to brave all judicial prosecutions 
 in order to preserve for it, at least in the periodical press, a last banner, a 
 last rallying signal. 
 
 The laws of September, by suppressing the discussion of principles in 
 which he delighted to indulge, and from which he hoped much, were very 
 afflicting to Carrel. He endured their yoke with a shuddering impatience ; 
 it is even said that his opinions then underwent some very serious modifi- 
 cations — not the less real that they were not strongly insisted upon in 
 his paper. His friends affirm that, dating from this time, and in propor- 
 tion as, by the effect of these laws, a calm in others came over that 
 former violence of principles which, for the most part, had been merely the 
 result of temperament and heat of blood, his ideas underwent a contrary 
 transmutation ; he became less hostile towards recollections and names he 
 had hitherto condemned, or at all events kept aloof from. A reconcile- 
 ment took place between him and men whom he had formerly rejected as 
 ultras : he exhibited a tendency to limit his principles of common right 
 and of universal liberty, and began to familiarize himself with the systems 
 of government which dispense with law and justice on the pretext of an 
 overwhelming necessity. 
 
 I shall not enter into the details of all Ins contests with the tribunals ; 
 he almost always defended himself in person before juries, and acquitted 
 himself of this task with an able combination of boldness and discretion 
 which often succeeded. Before the house of peers he was less successful, 
 but even there he had brilliant moments. His famous apostrophe to 
 marshal Ney, delivered in a sonorous, vibrating, and solemn voice, so 
 moved the heart of general Excelmans as to make him forget his character 
 of judge, and to transform him into the champion of Carrel. It was one of 
 the finest efforts of eloquence in our time. 
 
 We must now speak of a fault in Carrel, for which France is very in- 
 dulgent, and which we dare not too severely reproach him with, when we 
 
XIV MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 recollect that it cost him his life. In becoming a man of controversy , 
 Carrel had unfortunately retained the habits of a soldier, and it was one of 
 his weaknesses to suppose himself obliged always to accept from whatever 
 quarter they came, and too frequently himself to seek, occasions for armed 
 conflict. Under the Restoration, he had an hostile meeting with one of 
 the editors of the Drapeau Blanc, in which, with an extravagance by no means 
 rare in this kind of affair in press matters, each of the combatants was an 
 utter stranger to the two articles w r hich led to the combat. The discussions 
 to which the captivity of the duchess of Berry gave rise produced a second 
 duel, with swords, between a legitimist and Carrel, in which the latter, 
 after having wounded his adversary, himself received a wound in his 
 chest, which procured him the most flattering testimonies of an almost uni- 
 versal sympathy, and at the same time, on the part of his graver friends, 
 affectionate remonstrances, which he listened to with a smile and met with 
 promises of amendment. 
 
 Carrel's idea was, that a journal should make itself respected in the same 
 way that a man of honour does. In this he was so far right. It is, in 
 fact, very singular that two men may every morning say to each other, on a 
 couple of sheets of paper, things which they could not change viva, voce 
 without immediately afterwards exchanging also shots or sword thrusts. 
 But still, if a man would be respected, he must also respect his adversaries^ 
 and Carrel, so susceptible for himself, was too often wanting in moderation 
 and propriety towards others. It seemed, at times, as though out of fear 
 lest the advice of prudence and caution which he addressed to his party, 
 as to matters of collective engagements, should be misinterpreted, he de- 
 lighted in seeking occasions of personal danger by the most direct provoca- 
 tion to his adversaries ; as though while asserting the principle of free dis- 
 cussion, he himself could not endure it, and arrogated an exception in his 
 own person. It was thus that he too often sullied his best polemical pages 
 with excesses of language better suited to a blustering sub-lieutenant than 
 to the chief of a party. So Carrel travelled on a path which must one 
 day end in some catastrophe ; a catastrophe occurring at a time when there 
 was reason to hope that the greatest dangers of this kind had passed over ;. 
 as it were, at the end of the battle, when the heat of parties at war for six 
 years past was gradually subsiding, and, to crown the misfortune, upon a 
 question wiiich, in reality, concerned neither the person nor the principles of 
 Carrel. 
 
 A new paper, La Presse, was founded in 1836, at a price far below that 
 of any other paper hitherto known ; the originator, M. Emile de Girardin, 
 published prospectuses in which, as usual, he represented his journal as 
 infinitely superior to all others. A journalist then connected with the 
 Bon Sens, and who afterwards became intimate with M. de Girardin and 
 one of the editors of La Presse, thought proper to write a series of articles 
 in which M, de Girardin and his enterprise were assailed with vehement 
 personal abuse. The founder of La Presse brought an action for defamation 
 against the publisher of the Bon Sens. 
 
 Carrel, after having at first refused to interfere in a quarrel of this nature, 
 yielding to the solicitations of the editor of the Bon Se)ts, published in the 
 National a brief paragraph, in which, after expressing his " contempt" for the 
 prospectus of M. de Girardin, he severely blamed the latter for having re- 
 course to a court of justice to defend himself from attacks upon his en- 
 
MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 XV 
 
 terprise. M. de Girardin the next day answered in the Presse in the 
 following terms : 
 
 " The reproach of the National is deficient in the good faith attributed 
 to the character of M. Carrel. Doubtless that reproach could have been 
 merited if the Bon Sens had confined itself to a critical and close investi- 
 gation of the economical basis upon which La Presse is established ; but it 
 was not so : the most odious and personal accusations were heaped upon 
 M. de Girardin." 
 
 Then replying generally to the attacks directed against him personally by 
 various papers, M. de Girardin threatened them with employing the same 
 means against them, and ended by an allusion, applicable not in the least 
 to Carrel, but to one of his friends, another editor of the National, then in 
 a state of bankruptcy as head of some commercial enterprise. 
 
 Such is the exact summary of the facts which led Carrel once more to 
 expose his life to the chances of a duel. Immediately after reading the 
 article in La Presse he proceeded to the house of M. de Girardin, accom- 
 panied by the friend in question, who was more concerned in the matter 
 than he. I shall not enter into a detailed account of the conversation 
 which ensued, and the particulars of which are variously reported. All 
 accounts concur in saying that the affair seemed on the point of an 
 amicable arrangement by means of an explanatory note which the two 
 papers were to publish ; but M. de Girardin desired that the publication of 
 this note should be simultaneous, while Carrel wished it to be published in 
 the Presse first, and then copied into the National. It was upon this 
 trifling difference that Carrel, unable to obtain the concession he required, 
 arose and broke off the conference, by saying : "lam the offended party, 
 I choose the pistol." 
 
 The duel took place next morning, the 22nd of July, 1836, in the Bois 
 de Vincennes. The adversaries, advancing towards each other, fired at the 
 same moment, and both fell wounded, M. de Girardin in the thigh, and 
 Carrel in the groin. The first care of Carrel, ever as kind-hearted after 
 the combat as prompt to take offence, was to inquire whether his adversary 
 suffered much ; but on the first examination of the surgeons, his own 
 wound was judged to be far more serious. He was taken to the village of 
 Saint Mandé, to the house of one of his old comrades of the military school, 
 and here, after two days of cruel sufferings, after a strange and eloquent fit 
 of delirium, the dying agony of a poet and of a soldier, here, in the house 
 of a friend, whose effaced reminiscence thus reappeared in the last moment, 
 as a memory of youth, here Carrel expired on the 24th of July, at five in 
 the morning, in all the strength of talent and of life, for he was but thirty- 
 six. 
 
 This death, so premature, so unforeseen, was received with public mourn- 
 ing ; the papers of every opinion united in the expression of the same sen- 
 timents. Obsequies, as imposing from the immense concourse, as from 
 the rank, and the sincere grief of those present, testified the sorrow of 
 France, and the humble churchyard of Saint Mandé acquired an historical 
 renown by receiving among its obscure tombs this illustrious sepulchre. 
 It is indicated to the visitor by a bronze statue, from the chisel of David 
 (d'Angers), representing Carrel standing erect, the right arm extended 
 before him, his head slightly thrown back, in the haughty attitude he bore 
 when he evoked the shade of marshal Nev before the house of lords. 
 
XVI MEMOIR OF ARMAND CARREL. 
 
 Amidst the modifications which time and events produce in the field of 
 controversy, in the order of the battle of opinions, and in the disposition 
 of the combatants, no one can say what course would have been followed, 
 what influence would have been exercised by a man whose most intimate, 
 most precious qualities, those which far more than suffice to redeem some 
 few faults, were above all the purest disinterestedness and most perfect 
 honour. 
 
 It has been said that in the latter part of his life, Carrel, weary of the 
 daily and barren struggle against paltry facts more powerful than himself, 
 thought of resuming his historical labours, and that he was preparing to 
 write a history of Napoleon. Such a work by such a man would assuredly 
 have been no common production. 
 
 In another direction, the senate tempted him ; he had already in vain 
 sought access there ; but its doors would have not remained long closed to 
 him, and there a new career opened itself, where he would unquestionably 
 have enlarged his sphere of action, and completed his destiny. 
 
 In a word, the life of Carrel resembles one of those unfinished monuments 
 whose fragmentary beauties serve only to embitter the regret that we may 
 not contemplate the stupendous whole. 
 
 In private life, the illustrious editor of the National was, by the universal 
 statement of his friends, a being estimable for goodness of heart, for gene- 
 rosity, for devotedness and attachment. Bitter as was his pen, tenacious as 
 was his pride as a public man, in society he was frank, gentle, agreeable, 
 full of indulgence and good nature. With a Roman integrity as to money 
 or political intrigue, he combined the grace, the simple and elegant 
 urbanity of a French gentleman of the olden time. 
 
 Carrel died unmarried. 
 
 {Galerie des Contemporains Illustres.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER -REVOLUTION. 
 
 INTRODUCTION p. 1 
 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE RESTORATION, 
 
 State of 'England at the death of Cromwell — Richard Cromwell endeavours 
 to destroy the influence of the army, and to exalt the parliament — The 
 army overthrows the parliament and Richard — It restores and again 
 expels the Rump parliament — Divisions in the army — The Scotch army 
 sides with the parliament, that of England abandons its generals — The 
 royalists league with the presbyterians and the Scotch army; they ob- 
 tain the convocation of a parliament, according to the ancient constitu- 
 tion — This parliament recals the Stuarts — Last efforts of the repub- 
 licans — Alliance of the royalists, the Anglican churchmen and the pres- 
 byterians against the republicans — Circumstances of the restoration — 
 Trial of the regicides — Restitution of the property of the crown, of the 
 bishops, and the lords — Re-establishment of episcopacy — First attacks 
 on the presbyterians p. 45 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ANGLICAN SYSTEM. 
 
 The Anglicans at the head of the counter-revolution — Prosecution of the 
 Scottish presbyterian leaders — System established in Scotland — Con- 
 ferences at the Savoy between the presbvterians and the Anglicans — Per- 
 
 b 
 
XV111 CONTENTS. 
 
 secutions of the presbyterians — Tlie act against the presbyterians ex- 
 tended to the papists, and all the nonconforming protestants — Intrigues 
 of the court to obtain a distinction in favour of the papists — Resist- 
 ance of the ministry and commencement of opposition in the par- 
 liament — Composition of this parliament — Its laws respecting the 
 army, corporations, the press, religion — Progress of the misunder- 
 standing between the king and his Anglican ministers — Declaration of 
 indulgences published by the king in favour of the papists — War with 
 Holland — Complaints of the parliamentary opposition — Failure of the 
 Anglican ministry to maintain a balance between the court and the 
 parliament — The court and parliament overthrow the Anglican 
 ministry p. 61 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 MINISTRY OF THE CABAL. 
 
 Transition from the system of Clarendon to that of the libertines — Spirit 
 of the Cabal ministry, and of the parliamentary opposition — Secret 
 alliance between the Cabal and the court of France — Plans of the Cabal 
 for the establishment of absolute power and of popery — War with 
 Holland — Views of the Cabal in declaring this war — Charles II. pen- 
 sioned by Louis XIV. — The two houses of parliament insulted — Pro- 
 gress of the opposition — The presbyterians and the church-of-England 
 men come to an understanding — Revolution in Holland — The plans of 
 the Cabal frustrated — The king compelled to recur to parliament — 
 Struggle between the opposition and the Cabal on the subject of the 
 Anglican test — The parliament carry the test — Defections from the 
 Cabal ministry — Its fall p. 84 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE PRESBYTERIAN OPPOSITION. 
 
 Policy of Charles II. — Danby's ministry — Plans of the new administration 
 — Arrangements between Charles II. and Louis XIV. — Pretended medi- 
 ation in favour of Holland — Efforts of the opposition against the papists 
 and against Louis XIV. — Desertions from the court party — Prepon- 
 derance of tile presbyterians in the opposition — Charles II. obliged by 
 parliament to act in favour of Holland — Levy of thirty thousand men — 
 Diplomatic intrigues ; foreign war ; parliamentary debates before tlie 
 peace of Nymegen — Popish conspiracy p. Ill 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A NEW REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT. 
 
 Political results of the popish plot — Boldness of parliament — Discovery of 
 the relations with France — Influence of this discovery on the elections 
 for a new parliament — Spirit of the lower house — Affairs of the Danby 
 ministry — Advice of sir William Temple — Bill to exclude the duke of 
 York from the succession — Eesistance of the court — Progress of the 
 republican spirit in the lower house — The members of the church of 
 England reconciled with the court — Doubts of the nation favourable 
 to the republican party — The intentions of the party disclosed — Par- 
 liament of Oxford- — Abrupt defeat of the republican party . . p. 132 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ROYALIST REACTION. 
 
 Effects of the declaration of Oxford — General outbreak of the catholics, 
 the royalists, the members of the church of England, and the commer- 
 cial population against the whigs — The duke of York in favour — Direc- 
 tion given by him to the reaction in Scotland — He solicits and obtains 
 permission to return to England — His influence in the council — Affair 
 of the sheriffs of London — Attacks on the charters of the towns and 
 corporations — Prosecutions of the excluders and the whigs throughout 
 the kingdom — Persecutions of the presbyterians in Scotland — Conspiracy 
 of the whigs of England and the presbyterians of Scotland — Discovery 
 of the conspiracy — Trials and death of the chief conspirators — Indiffer- 
 ence of the nation — Results of the Anglo- Scottish plot favourable to the 
 court, especially to the duke of York, and the papists ... p. 155 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 RE -ESTABLISHMENT OF CATHOLICISM. 
 
 The duke of York, the catholics, and the absolutists, at the head of the 
 counter-revolution — Rupture between the king and the predominant 
 party — Death of the king — Triumph of the catholics; accession of 
 James II. — Promises of James II. ; oath of the coronation — Resignation 
 of the English people — Reinstatement of the parties condemned for the 
 
XX CONTENTS. 
 
 popish plot ; acts of revenge against the informers — Attempt of the earl 
 of Argyle and the duke of Monmouth — The catholic party strengthened 
 by them — Pretensions to absolute power, to the right of dispensing with 
 tests, contested by parliament — Prorogation of parliament — Establish- 
 ment of a standing army — Conversions to popery — Decision of the 
 judges of the king's bench in favour of the dispensing power — The 
 papists elevated to offices throughout the three kingdoms— Ecclesiastical 
 commission instituted against the members of the church of England — 
 Trials of the bishop of London and of Samuel Johnson — General sub- 
 mission — Separation of the ruling party into moderate catholics and high 
 catholics p. 181 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ABSOLUTE POWER. 
 
 The Jesuits at the head of the counter-revolution — First project for excluding 
 the prince of Orange from the succession— System of religious tolera- 
 tion — Brief alliance, under this system, of the nonconforming protestants 
 and the catholics — Embassy of d'Albeville and of Dykvelt — Success of 
 Dykvelt in England — Fruitless efforts of d'Albeville to deceive the prince 
 of Orange — Absolute power proclaimed by ordinance in England and Scot- 
 land — Resistance of the chirrch-of-England men ; the catholics abandoned 
 by the nonconformists — Second plan of the Jesuits with regard to the 
 succession — Visit of the king and queen to Bath — Pretended pregnancy 
 of the queen — Invasion of the universities by the Jesuits — Useless efforts 
 to form an absolutist parliament — Second ordinance proclaiming absolute 
 power — The bishops refuse to read the ordinance — Trial of the bishops 
 — Pretended birth of a prince of Wales — General demonstration of the 
 people and the régulai' troops against the government of the Jesuits — 
 The protestant aristocracy prevent a new revolution by calling in the 
 prince of Orange p. 222 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE REVOLUTION OF 1688. 
 
 Deputation of the English lords to the prince — Promises of the prince — 
 His instructions respecting the protestant dissenters — Definitive recon- 
 ciliation between the protestants of all sects — Favourable disposition of 
 the fleet and the army towards the prince — The petition of the English 
 lords — State of affairs in Europe in 1088 — In what manner they pre- 
 vented Louis XIV. from affording assistance to James II. — Warlike 
 
CONTENTS. XXI 
 
 preparations of the prince — Discussions amongst the refugees on the 
 subject of the prince's manifesto — Departure of the expedition — Apathy 
 of James and of the Jesuits — William's fleet driven back by a tempest — 
 The Jesuits arouse themselves at this news — William departs a second 
 time — His landing — Flight of James IT. — The part taken in the revolu- 
 tion by the nobility and citizens — Hopes of the people deceived — 
 Establishment of a royalty by consent p. 253 
 
 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES IL 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Introductory observations — First period, from Henry VII. to the year 1588 
 — Second period, from 1588 to 1640 — Meeting of Parliament — Redress 
 of grievances — Strafford's attainder — The commencement of the civil war 
 — Treaty from the Isle of Wight — The king's execution— Cromwell's 
 power ; his character — Indifference of the nation respecting forms of 
 government — The restoration — Ministry of Clarendon and Southampton 
 — Cabal — Dutch war — De Witt — The prince of Orange — The popish 
 plot — The Habeas Corpus Act — The Exclusion Bill — Dissolution of 
 Charles the Second's last parliament — His power; his tyranny in Scot- 
 land ; in England — Exorbitant fines — Executions — Forfeitures of char- 
 ters — Despotism established — Despondency of good men — Charles's 
 death ; his character — Reflections upon the probable consequences of 
 his reign and death p. 291 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Accession of James II. — His declaration in council ; acceptable to the 
 nation — Arbitrary designs of his reign — Former ministers continued — 
 Money transactions with France — Revenue levied without authority 
 of parliament — Persecution of dissenters — Character of Jeffreys — The 
 king's affectation of independence — Advances to the prince of Orange — 
 The primary object of this reign — Transactions in Scotland — Severe 
 persecutions there — Scottish parliament — Cruelties of government — 
 English parliament; its proceedings — Revenue — Votes concerning 
 religion — Bill for preservation of the king's person — Solicitude for the 
 church of England — Reversal of Stafford's attainder rejected — Parlia- 
 ment adjourned — Character of the tories — Situation of the whigs. p. 329 
 
I 
 
 XX11 CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Attempts of Argyle and Monmouth — Account of their followers — Argyle's 
 expedition discovered — His descent in Argyleshire — Dissensions among 
 his followers — Loss of his shipping — His army dispersed, and himself 
 taken prisoner — His behaviour in prison — His execution — The fate of 
 his followers — Eumbold's last declaration examined — Monmouth's 
 invasion of England — His first success and reception — His delays, dis- 
 appointment, and despondency — Battle of Sedgmoor— He is discovered 
 and taken — His letter to the king — His interview with James — His 
 preparations for death — Circumstances attending his execution — His 
 character p. 378 
 
HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION 
 
 5n ISnglanfc, 
 
 UNDER CHARLES IL AND JAMES II. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The counter-revolution to which the two kings, Charles II. 
 and James IL, had the misfortune to attach the destinies of 
 their family, was the last resistance opposed in England by 
 the royal power to the establishment of the popular govern- 
 ment. The twenty-eight years during which this power did 
 violence to opinions, to interests, and to wants which had 
 been made manifest by the overthrow of the ancient order of 
 things, have been erroneously regarded as a time of degrada- 
 tion with the English nation. 
 
 She had obeyed powerful necessity in resuming as masters 
 the sons of him whom the revolution had conquered and 
 killed; she had recalled them without taking due precautions, 
 without exacting from them that they should acknowledge 
 her rights as she acknowledged theirs. 
 
 Thence arose a new quarrel; power again sought to be 
 absolute; the same beliefs and the same opinions which had 
 once overthrown it, again resisted it; but, rendered less ardent 
 by the results of their former errors, they resisted with other 
 arms, and took their station upon a battle field which would 
 confer less lustre on resistance. 
 
 This battle field was that of legality: the nation in dis- 
 puting it inch by inch learned better to know it. To main- 
 
 i 
 
2 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION, 
 
 tain herself there, she rejected those blind forces which could 
 not be plied to rational warfare; she even upheld the restora- 
 tion against men who regretted the republic, and sacrificed 
 these in order to preserve those results of the revolution 
 which she wished to see adopted by the reigning family. 
 
 The Stuarts might well have accommodated themselves to 
 this system; there was against them party hatred, but no 
 national antipathy; yet they fell a second time. 
 
 As if there were in this denouement of the English counter- 
 revolution a salutary lesson for the time in which we live, 
 we turn with a lively curiosity towards the space which in- 
 tervened between the recal of the Stuarts and their second 
 fall. We would know why the existence of that royal house 
 had become incompatible with the interests of England ; why 
 its second downfal was effected with such a strange facility, 
 so little trouble or shock. 
 
 Was this catastrophe written in the laws of a predestina- 
 tion of ill fortune attached to the race of the Stuarts? or 
 was it the effect of a combination of external events fortui- 
 tously united against them? 
 
 I will reply by exhibiting the English counter-revolution 
 in its progress, its various modes of action, and the ever 
 increasing train of its pretensions. Thus the result will be 
 shown in its causes. 
 
 We shall see that the Stuarts did not fall beneath an in- 
 fluence hostile to royalty; that they had always on their side 
 the enlightened and acting mass, that interested in the cause 
 of repose and order, whenever the remnant of the religious 
 and political parties, the last comers in the revolution, en- 
 deavoured by agitation to restore a state of things in opposi- 
 tion to the elements of which society was composed. 
 
 For every question of political form has its data in the 
 state of society, and nowhere else; and thus the brief exist- 
 ence of the republic in England had been nothing but a 
 compulsory deviation from the constitutional track which the 
 nation had marked out, and so long followed. Of its own mo- 
 tion, the nation had re-entered this beloved track when she re- 
 called the Stuarts, and she thus left them nothing to do against 
 the revolution, properly so called. There still remained the 
 liberties achieved by the revolution, but demanded long before 
 it; the nation was ready with pride to hold these of her kings; 
 
INTRODUCTION. 6 
 
 willing to forget that it had wrested the power from those 
 kings only by main force. 
 
 It was upon these liberties that the restoration made war. 
 It brought them into question one after the other, and 
 wished to reascend, one by one, the steps which the royal 
 power had descended, from century to century, in order to 
 reconcile its existence with that of new interests. 
 
 Thus the counter-revolution taught the English people 
 that their liberties were incompatible with enforced royalty, 
 and that to preserve royalty with advantage, it must be re- 
 generated, that is to say, must be separated from the principle 
 of legitimacy. 
 
 Without previously attaining an exact idea of that past in 
 which the restoration sought an imaginary order of things, 
 we could neither comprehend it, nor follow it in its retrograde 
 march, without direction as without term. I have therefore 
 thought that, before we come to the counter-revolution, it is 
 indispensable to place before you both the revolution and its 
 most distant antecedents. When, at the conclusion of this 
 history, we shall come to the last and inevitable developments 
 of the reaction under a Jesuit king, we shall see whether I 
 have gone too far back in my inquiries. 
 
 I. In the system of political guarantees which England de- 
 fended against the two last Stuarts, there remained nothing an- 
 terior to the Norman conquest. The captains and soldiers 
 of William, in imperiously establishing themselves 
 as great and petty feudal sovereigns in the midst of the Saxon 
 nation, at once deprived it of property in the soil, and of its 
 ancient political and religious organization. The imperfect 
 fusion of the two races for a long time kept alive the hatreds 
 arising from difference of origin, with those which, under 
 the feudal regime, everywhere arose from the difference 
 of conditions. Still, from the middle of the twelfth century, 
 the state of things established by the conquest had produced 
 its habits; the struggle between the conquerors and the 
 conquered had no longer for its object the possession of the 
 soil, but the necessity of regulating for all, the relations of 
 masterdom and of servitude. The descendants of the con- 
 querors and of the vanquished of Hastings already caused 
 dread abroad by the formidable alliance of their warlike 
 qualities, and all the men born in England besan to look 
 
 b2 ° 
 
HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 upon themselves as forming but one people. This quality of 
 native born Englishmen decidedly prevailed over the dis- 
 tinctions of the conquest, when a vast continental reaction 
 drove to the court of William's fifth successor those who, in 
 the provinces of western and southern Gaul, were for the 
 Anglo-Norman domination. King John received his foreign 
 subjects, or those born out of England, in a manner which 
 gave every reason to fear a total subversion of the feudal 
 distribution of the country. The bishops, the barons, the 
 petty feudatories of Norman descent, the inhabitants of the 
 towns, already forming the mixed Anglo-Norman race, and 
 the serfs of Saxon origin, dreaded the enterprising poverty 
 of the new comers, and leagued against them. The obsti- 
 nacy and perseverance of John and his successors in en- 
 couraging and enriching these foreigners, Poitevins, Bretons, 
 French, and Gascons, strengthened the tie of nationality 
 among the natives, and produced against feudal royalty, which 
 had been so strongly constituted by William, insurrections 
 which occupied the whole of the thirteenth century. The 
 first and most formidable compelled the royal power to 
 
 the concession known by the name of Magna Charta. 
 
 This was a victory almost entirely aristocratic ; but the 
 Anglo-Norman citizens and the Saxon serfs profited by the 
 part they had taken in it. Several articles of the great charter 
 assured to the large towns certain franchises favourable to 
 commerce, and to the rural serfs a first step in property, 
 that of oxen and of the instruments of labour, by means of 
 
 which they gained their bread. The last insurrection, 
 .. ' under Simon de Montfort, bore the same character; 
 the barons again humbled the royal power, but the inhabitants 
 of towns and boroughs, as the price of their co-operation, and 
 in consequence of the progress which the first concessions had 
 already enabled them to make, began to be counted as some- 
 thing in the State. Thenceforward, forming a class, under 
 the general name of commons, they were summoned to appear 
 in the council where the bishops and the barons assembled 
 of right, three times a year, to deliberate upon public affairs. 
 Favoured by the continental wars, which, under the three 
 first Edwards, gave an external direction to the activity and 
 force of the aristocracy, the results of the great insurrections 
 
INTRODUCTION. O 
 
 fructified for the commons. Whilst the seignorial power was 
 exhausting itself, was wearing itself out at a distance, the 
 citizens, working and paying more and more, were more 
 frequently called upon to come and learn in parliament what 
 was being done for the interests of all. The kings and the 
 barons, in order to have their support in wars, ruinous in 
 their results though brilliantly successful in themselves, 
 were interested in favouring their rising industry. 
 
 The same causes at the same time rendered the condition 
 of the country villeins harder than in past periods. The 
 distant expeditions, combined with the progress of luxury, 
 obliged the seigneurs, whether they resided on their estates, 
 or had them administered during their absence, to weigh 
 still more heavy than ever with corvées and taxes upon those 
 whom they called their naifs (born upon their lands). Com- 
 plaint at length arose, and became as general as the evil 
 which called it forth. The lot of the oppressed interested 
 people less unfortunate and less ignorant than they; priests, 
 tradesmen dwelling in the towns, and enjoying privileges as 
 such. Brief pamphlets were zealously distributed around the 
 feudal halls; popular proverbs, serving to disguise appeals to 
 insurrection, flew from mouth to mouth; associations of serfs 
 were formed in all directions; a vague memory was awakened 
 of the event which had imposed the foreign yoke; an admirable 
 instinct taught the oppressed that it was to royal authority 
 they must appeal from the tyranny of the barons, and all 
 at once, an hundred thousand men, an advanced guard of 
 several millions of serfs, covered the roads which from 
 the various counties led to London. The young 
 king Richard II. came in person to hear their complaints. 
 The chiefs held daring conferences with him. He granted 
 them charters which enfranchised all the serfs of England, their 
 children, and their goods. These charters, without a means 
 of compelling the seignorial authority to respect them, w r ere 
 but vain concessions; the insurgents demanded guarantees. 
 But while they hesitated, some washing to stand firm, the 
 rest to retire, the barons, who at first had concealed themselves, 
 recovered from their terror. They hastened from the country 
 round London; and, under pretext of danger incurred by the 
 king, whilst he parleyed with the insurgents, fell upon them, 
 
D HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 and forced them to fly in all directions. Richard II. revoked 
 his charters, and everything returned to the order established 
 by the conquest. 
 
 The serfs were not destined to obtain their liberty until 
 the seignorial authority felt, in its turn, the necessity of 
 granting it to them. The eighty-three years that elapsed 
 between the reign of Richard II. and that of Henry VII. 
 witnessed the commencement of gradual emancipation, during 
 the wars which made Bedford regent of France, and its con- 
 tinuation, amidst the commotions caused by the rivalry of 
 the houses of York and Lancaster. The nobles, continually 
 involved in war expenditure, were obliged by their neces- 
 sities to acknowledge that rents in kind, so vexatious to the 
 villeins, were unprofitable to themselves; that lands and flocks 
 prospered better in the hands of farmers who were sure of 
 just returns for their industry, than in those of serfs, idle 
 because they had no interest in the matter. By degrees, 
 they came to prefer hired to compulsory services. Individual 
 enfranchisements were multiplied, as is shown by a multitude 
 of acts drawn .up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; 
 in this form given by the historian of the Norman conquest: 
 " Know that we have freed from all yoke of servitude, so 
 and so, our naifs of such and such a manor, them and their 
 children born and to be born." 
 
 These partial emancipations by degrees approximated the 
 condition of the peasants to that of the citizens, as the royal 
 concessions had placed the privileges of the citizens near to 
 the prerogatives of the military and ecclesiastical nobility; 
 and, on account of the difference of position, the circumstances 
 which enforced the enfranchisement of the serfs did still more 
 for the increasing importance of the citizens. Their progress 
 was manifested in the different attitude assumed by their re- 
 presentatives in parliament. These, in the outset, had obeyed 
 with repugnance the order which summoned them to come 
 and declare if the commons were able or not to support such 
 and such charges or taxes. They joined to the at first alto- 
 gether humble expression of their opinion, petitions tending to 
 enforce or limit it. These petitions became an established 
 usage, and, unperceived by the citizens, a commencement 
 of participation in legislative authority in matters of tax- 
 ation. Instead of a simple opinion, it was, by and bye, 
 
INTRODUCTION. / 
 
 a consent which they gave. The epoch at which French, 
 which they did not understand, ceased to be spoken in the 
 annual council of the three orders, was without doubt that in 
 which they were admitted to a practical share in the manage- 
 ment of affairs. A further step was indicated by the sepa- 
 ration of the parliament into two chambers: the one com- 
 posed of the high clergy, the earls and barons convoked 
 by royal summons; the other of petty feudatories and 
 citizens of towns, elected by their peers. In the parliament 
 thus divided, the aristocratic element constantly prevailed 
 throughout the course of the external wars and civil troubles 
 which occupied the fifteenth century. It was, at this time, 
 the upper chamber, which, in virtue of its composition, play- 
 ing the part of a feudal diet, made and unmade so many 
 kings, exacted oaths from some, claimed to regulate the con- 
 duct of others, ejected ministers, replaced them by others of 
 their own choice, and in a word, created against royalty the 
 many precedents which were afterwards to destroy it. The 
 lower chamber, tacitly assenting to these attacks, in which it 
 did not as yet feel any interest, solely applied itself to the 
 maintaining its right of consenting to taxes. The right of 
 discussing them, under its higher points of view, accrued to 
 it with the growing practical importance given to its members 
 by the financial skill acquired in the management of private 
 interests. In 1355, the lower chamber had already sufficient 
 liberty to dare to say, that the portion of the public burdens 
 paid by the commons was too great, and to demand what 
 they did not obtain, that the revenues of the clergy should be 
 applied to the general expenses. Towards the year 1470, the 
 war of the two Roses, so ruinous and destructive to the aris- 
 tocracy, drawing near its close, the preamble of all the par- 
 liamentary acts began to run thus: " Given by the king and 
 by the lords, with the consent of the commons." 
 
 II. It was by this consent that Henry VIL, the first 
 of the Tudors, ascended the throne; and he main- 
 tained himself in it, not because he united in his person the 
 rights of the two rival branches, but because he was the man 
 of all others necessary to the accomplishment of a re- 
 volution, which the disastrous quarrel of the two Roses 1485 
 had prepared. More than a million of men had -^^ 
 perished in this thirty years' war; the mortality had 
 
S HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 been especially excessive amongst the ranks of the nobles, 1 
 and the survivors were half ruined: thus the social power no 
 longer resided in the aristocracy, which was so recently the 
 exclusive proprietor of the soil. By the breaking up of 
 the great domains, they passed to the petty nobles, the citi- 
 zens, the yeomanry, eager and able to acquire all that the 
 great lords could no longer retain. As to political power, 
 the high nobility lost it with their territorial property; nor 
 was it the disunited commons, ignorant of their own power and 
 position, requiring as yet only to obey and be safe, and not de- 
 siring to govern for themselves and by themselves, who could 
 dream of exercising this power: this ambition befitted royalty 
 alone; and to realise it, the alliance formerly contemned by 
 Richard II. now offered itself to Henry VIL, rendered practi- 
 cable by time. He accepted, comprehended it, and became all 
 powerful. 
 
 Bred up in feudal anarchy, this king had always 
 1485 detested it. He made laws to hasten the dissolution 
 1509. °f tne conquering society. He allowed the great 
 families to sell their domains, despite the entails with 
 which they were burdened; he gave offices to those who from 
 want of money divested themselves of estates; he essayed 
 to ruin, by processes, those who persisted in retaining 
 them. He armed against them the famous tribunal known 
 by the name of the Star Chamber, and had adjudged to 
 himself those large fortunes which gave him uneasiness. He 
 forbad the nobles to have those numerous troops of people 
 wearing their livery, who became armies in their coalitions 
 against each other, or against royalty. He not only allowed 
 the petty feudatories and citizens to redeem at a low price 
 their dependence on the ancient manors, but he frequently 
 lent them money to make such acquisitions, or to assist 
 them in their commercial speculations. He employed a 
 great number of architects, not as his predecessors by corvée, 
 but by selection, the reward of a new emulation. The 
 monuments of his time prove that instead of adhering to a 
 fixed sum for the days' labour, to all alike, he began to dis- 
 tinguish talent by higher payment and honour. During his 
 
 1 In the parliament preceding the outbreak of the war of the two Roses, 
 fifty-three peers, besides bishops, took their seats in the upper chamber. 
 In the first parliament of Henry VII. their number had fallen to twenty- 
 five ; by new creations he raised it to forty. 
 
INTRODUCTION. y 
 
 reign, the parliaments were held in subjection; but this insti- 
 tution was still entirely aristocratic, and far from becoming 
 threatening as a popular institution. Condemnations deci- 
 mated and ruined the upper chamber; the lower chamber, in 
 comparison with this, thought itself fortunate in being merely 
 the object of haughty dictation. It augmented its material 
 greatness in silence. When under Henry VIII. it was 
 tempted to resume the hardy language it once could use when 
 the high chamber set it the example, Henry VIII. dispensed 
 with it during seven years, and, arbitrarily levying taxes, 
 showed it how very far the importance of its consent was 
 from being understood by the nation. 
 
 When the upper chamber, recruited with parvenus, enriched 
 by Henry VII. and Henry VIIL, was composed of members 
 who owed all to the court, or who knew that they could lose 
 all by it, it was this chamber which still gave to that of the 
 commons, instead of the example of successful temerity against 
 royalty, that of abject obedience and blind submission, recom- 
 pensed, and sometimes despised by the capricious despot. In 
 the royal sittings under Henry VIII., the commons standing, 
 according to the ancient custom, learned from the peers who 
 were seated before them and faced the throne, to bow down to 
 the ground every time that the name of the monarch, who was 
 present, carelessly stretched at his ease, passed the lips of the 
 ministers. And these, all of them men of low birth, and the 
 vilest of flatterers, no longer occupied the ancient national 
 council with public affairs, but solely with the virtues of the 
 king. The lords, holding all by grace and favour, no longer 
 thought of finding the demands of subsidies too great, and the 
 commons, although they were interested in giving little, 1509 
 dared not differ from their ancient chiefs. The great to 
 social existence of the upper chamber being thus re- J603 
 placed by a political condition fixed by royalty, and dependent 
 upon it, the parliament remained in this state of subservience 
 so long as the work of aggrandisement, which alone could 
 give weight to legal protests, and the apprenticeship necessary 
 to acquire the proper use of these new arms, remained un- 
 accomplished by the petty nobles and the citizens represented 
 in the lower chamber. This progress became strongly de- 
 veloped during the six years of protectorate which succeeded 
 the reign of Henry VIII. The lower chamber, in assigning 
 to the crown the regular revenue, entitled poundage and ton- 
 
10 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 nage, energetically opposed the levying of arbitrary taxes, 
 sought to protect itself from the laws which it had allowed 
 to be made against the aristocracy, and revised the odious 
 chapter of treasons against the crown. Aided in this by 
 the upper chamber, it decreed that mere words could never 
 constitute this crime, so common under the preceding reigns; 
 and that as to acts, they must be proved by two wit- 
 nesses of known credit. 
 
 Under Elizabeth, the same progress continued but 
 1509 2 esg yisibly; and, despite the still living gratitude of 
 16 Q3 England, it was not the work of this queen. Like 
 her father, employed in regenerating, to the profit of 
 the crown, the aristocracy despoiled and borne down by her 
 grandfather, she was rigorous towards the middle classes, 
 who threatened to become preponderant. She possessed 
 sufficient energy and wisdom to fashion them to monarchical 
 society, before they conceived the idea that there might be 
 a better substitute for feudal society. To avoid disputes 
 with them in parliament, she rarely demanded subsidies 
 from them, and by continual alienation of the royal do- 
 mains, impoverished the crown, whilst the daring spirit, 
 the novelty and success of commercial speculations 5 elevated 
 the nation to a degree of splendour hitherto unknown. The 
 depredations called benevolences, free-gifts, and purveyances, 
 did not stay the luxuriant vigour in this direction; but the 
 tyrannical laws made under the preceding reigns against the 
 aristocracy, prevented this vigour from directing itself to 
 state affairs, and from demanding an account of the profusion 
 of the court which it supported. From the first years of 
 the following reign, we may judge of the extent to which 
 the despotic daughter of Henry VIII. had subdued the spirit 
 of her time; consciences alone spoke, and complained and 
 spake out as was fitting. Laying aside vain lamentations, 
 they attacked the royal power in its source and in its 
 abuses. 
 
 III. As if in this history each of the epochs marked by 
 progress bore in itself the germ of the progress which 
 was to follow, the courage which was about to be shown 
 by consciences in attacking the royal power, was the 
 fruits of the efforts which royalty itself had made to 
 render itself absolute. Henry VIII., jealous of a respected 
 
INTRODUCTION. 1 1 
 
 and powerful clergy, who acknowledged a foreign master in 
 order to have no master in England, had violently plunged 
 the nation into a schism which substituted himself as chief of 
 the church in place of the pope. The ecclesiastical hierarchy 
 was in part preserved, with its great possessions 1 by ac- 
 knowledging the religious supremacy, and proclaiming the 
 infallibility of the new chief who had imposed himself upon it; 
 the lower clergy, freed from celibacy, and preserving its im- 
 munities and tithes, had submitted. The religions orders had 
 resisted, strong in their immense riches and in the super- 
 stition of the people. Henry VIII. had deprived them of 
 their fine establishments, their ancient and peaceful domains, 
 their treasures, the fruits of pious legacies, of illustrious 
 alms, and of the popular tribute of indulgences. 1509 
 With these spoils he enriched the courtiers of the upper 16 Qg 
 house and the docile purchasers in the lower house; 
 he had thus founded his reformation upon an immovable 
 temporal basis, upon the interests of a full third of the 
 landed proprietors of that period. But by printing the 
 Old Testament, forbidden by the Romish church, by holding 
 up to scorn and contempt the monastic impostures and 
 turpitude, and by reasoning against those whose scruples 
 arrested them on the threshold of the new church, he had 
 given rise to, or favoured in their birth, wishes for a more 
 energetic reform, and soon saw himself outstripped by secta- 
 ries who, with Bible in hand, demanded the abolition of 
 episcopacy, condemned religious supremacy in a king as in a 
 pope, and of the ancient ecclesiastical constitution desired to 
 retain only the priesthood. These were the puritans or 
 presbyterians. 
 
 Aided by the upper chamber, the protectorate, during the 
 minority of the son of Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour, sus- 
 tained against them and against the catholics the royal work 
 compromised in its birth by its own means. The persecution 
 which destroyed and pillaged, under the general name of non- 
 
 1 Of sixty-two spiritual peers, thirty-six were expelled from the upper 
 house. The number of the temporal lords was increased, uuder the same 
 reign, to fifty-one. The number of knights of shires in the lower house 
 was rather less than eighty ; that of the deputies of cities and towns, haying 
 right of election, was extremely variable ; power began to fear their pre- 
 sence. 
 
12 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 conformists, and without exception of creed, those who re- 
 fused to acknowledge the religious supremacy of the king, 
 drew from all the various sects, united in a common resist- 
 ance, one simultaneous cry for justice. This cry, Liberty of 
 conscience! w T as, unknown to themselves, the first declaration 
 of a principle always invoked by the persecuted sects, always 
 violated by them in their transient triumphs. During the 
 
 protectorate was seen a popular insurrection at once 
 1509 puritanical and catholic, proclaiming the right of 
 1003. religious opinion. A tanner, the chief of the revolt, 
 
 proclaimed, in his appeal to arms, that no man could 
 impose upon another his doctrine and worship. The same pro- 
 clamations for the first time mingled political attacks with 
 religious complaints; they called upon the commons to rise 
 out of their degradation, and to free themselves from the 
 tyranny of the rich. 
 
 At the accession of the catholic queen Mary, the spirit 
 of religious reform, which was to draw from the Bible so 
 many formidable arguments against political order, mani- 
 fested itself still more energetically; the puritans w r rote and 
 publicly maintained that the daughter of Catherine of Arra- 
 gon and Henry VIII. could not reign, because it is said in 
 the Old Testament, that " the king shall be chosen from among 
 the brothers." The parliament was obliged to declare that 
 the royal prerogatives were the same under a queen as under 
 a king. The religious counter-revolution under queen Mary 
 was another step towards political revolution. All powerful 
 as was this queen by her alliance on the continent and by her 
 marriage with Philip II., she could not bring the parliament 
 to declare the re-establishment of Catholicism without re- 
 storing to this body a part of its ancient importance» Her 
 father had transmitted to her religious supremacy, combined 
 with arbitrary political power; she destroyed this unity of 
 
 the royal will. In order to overthrow the Reformation, 
 !509 w hich served as a basis to religious supremacy, she was 
 1605 obliged to alienate a vast portion of arbitrary power. 
 
 Not daring to command, she made an exchange; 
 she gave security to the possessors of ecclesiastical property, 
 and contented herself with bestowing on the despoiled monks, 
 whom she meant to re-establish, an indemnity too feeble to 
 restore their lost power, but sufficient to authorize in the 
 parliamentary discussions the murmurs of the upper house 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 and the loud complaints of the lower chamber. During this 
 reign, it was no longer the catholics but those who had 
 adopted the Reformation of Henry VIII. who suffered with 
 the puritans. The necessary result, for the two protestant 
 sects, from the community of dangers and interests occurred: 
 the most energetic influenced, dominated, and almost wholly 
 subjected the other. So early as the year 1571, the thirteenth 
 of the reign of Elizabeth, the majority of the lower chamber 
 was composed of the enemies of prelacy. A member, a de- 
 clared puritan, demanded a more complete religious reform. 
 His motion was not discussed, and the queen ordered him not 
 to appear again in the chamber. He was disposed to obey 
 this order; but during his absence his friends maintained that 
 simply incurring the queen's displeasure was not sufficient to 
 deprive a deputy of the character with which election had 
 invested him. An animated debate took place upon 
 the privileges of the lower chamber, the court was 1509 
 forced to yield, and the excluded member was greeted 2GO0 
 with loud applause upon resuming his seat. 
 
 This manifestation, and others of the same kind, contri- 
 buted as much as the natural pride of Elizabeth to inspire 
 her with a strong aversion to parliamentary forms. The 
 puritans wrote against her, and, persecuted as they were, 
 made active war against her by means of the legal press, 
 and afterwards, when this was closely restricted, by means of the 
 clandestine press. The religious tribunal, the court of high 
 commission, and the political tribunal so dreaded under the 
 name of the Star Chamber, took cognizance indifferently of the 
 crimes created by these attacks; people were held guilty of 
 high treason for professing the puritan creed, and guilty of 
 sacrilege for blaming the acts of the queen's government. 
 Power no longer defending its two great attributes, tem- 
 poral and spiritual, by the arm proper to each, but 
 striking both at once, the confusion necessarily occasioned 
 acts of violence on refusal of obedience. The proselytism of 
 the Holy Scriptures spread itself; the nation, as it became 
 better informed, reasoned more closely; the experience of 
 every day proved that the dogma of religious supremacy 
 could only be sustained by the excess of political tyranny. It 
 was, then, only by the overthrow of the latter that the par- 
 tisans of the pure reformation could hope for the triumph of 
 their convictions. 
 
14 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 The penetrating eye of Elizabeth did not perhaps 
 15u9 perceive in its most daring results the actual situation 
 1603. °f tne nonconforming protestants; yet, even during her 
 life, they began to declare that kings, in the eyes of 
 Jesus Christ, were no more than the least of their subjects; 
 that if their religious supremacy was derived from their poli- 
 tical authority, this sovereignty over persons and consciences 
 was nowhere to be found in the divine law. These blasphemies 
 against power, but half developed as they were, gave Eliza- 
 beth that vivid alarm which troubled her last moments; but 
 she prudently refrained from arguing with those who opposed 
 texts of scripture to the texts of her ordinances, which, said 
 they, were human laws, and, as such, subject to the common 
 imperfection. 
 
 IV. However, royalty could not long be thus attacked at 
 its root without feeling the necessity of clearly defining itself; 
 the brutal law of force no longer sufficed it, as under Henry 
 VIII. ; it was necessary for it to put forth a learned theory, in 
 the order of considerations upon which the spirit of examina- 
 tion began to be exercised. This dangerous lot fell to the 
 son of Mary Stuart, who was called to succeed to Elizabeth, 
 and he employed all the frivolous pedantry and love for 
 the subtleties of theology with which nature had endowed 
 him, in everywhere provoking the discussion which Elizabeth 
 had endeavoured to prevent. 
 
 James I. united to the crown of England that of Scotland, 
 which was already too heavy for his head. That which 
 in England was desired by the partizans of the pure re- 
 formation, James had left established in his kingdom of Scot- 
 land. There religious reform arising from the people, had been 
 more energetic than in England, where it was the work of the 
 monarch. The Scotch reformers, disciples of Calvin, had with 
 one and the same blow destroyed papal domination and the 
 ecclesiastical hierarchy. Royal power had vainly struggled 
 against them under the widow of James V., under Mary Stuart, 
 and during the stormy minority of James VI. The latter, now 
 king of England, under the title of James I., had in Scot- 
 land been obliged to consent to the destruction of episcopacy 
 and the establishment of a new church, composed of presby- 
 teries, provincial synods, and grand councils. These various 
 assemblies united among themselves in a certain order of de- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 pendence, had also formed in the state a sort of religious re- 
 public, with pulpits for tribunes, churches for parliament houses, 
 and for law the Old Testament, expounded in favour of the 
 weak against the strong. Thenceforth, in Scotland, the nobles 
 and kings had been incessantly anathematised, not as go- 
 verning ill, but as creating scandal by their impiety and their 
 dissolute conduct. 
 
 The English puritans went still further, persecution and their 
 more advanced state of civilization having brought them to a 
 more daring and more enlightened investigation. On the 
 arrival of James I., they imagined that his accession 1603 
 would be a religious era for them ; and amid the rej oicings *° 
 at his installation, assailed him with petitions in favour of 
 the Scottish worship. But James, already aw^are of the tendency 
 of presbyterian doctrines; " Go," said he, to the English puri- 
 tans, " your belief agrees with monarchy as God does with the 
 devil. No bishops, no king." Thus, far from wishing to 
 aid in the destruction of episcopacy in England, he at once 
 formed the project of restoring it in Scotland, and of esta- 
 blishing the Anglican worship, in both his kingdoms. In 
 order to bring the two nations to this religious conformity, 
 he started his Divine Right, a term new to the English, and 
 he occupied the whole of his reign in dissertations destined 
 to teach them what they were to understand by it; he made 
 a distinction between kings in abstracto, to whom it was 
 permitted to do what they pleased, and those in concrete, who 
 were obliged (as he said) to govern according to the laws of 
 the country, but obliged only by their consciences. He was 
 quite willing, in his graciousness, to be a king of the latter 
 class, so that nothing further was required of him; "for," 
 said he, " to contest the power of kings, is to dispute the 
 power of God." 
 
 The bishops eager to grant to the royal power that w r hich 
 they in time desired to obtain from it, became the cham- 
 pions of his doctrine. The religious supremacy of kings began 
 to be irksome to them; to free themselves from the state of 
 dependence in which it placed them, they sought to find in 
 the divine law their own right written side by side with that 
 which James attributed to himself, and the Idng sanctioned 
 in them these lofty pretensions. The better to struggle 
 against the progress of presbyterian doctrines, it suited him to 
 
16 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 derive from one common source the authority of kings and that 
 of bishops. Their political aggrandisement, their more ample 
 participation in high offices, was the result of this system, but 
 at the same time it was a grave offence to the temporal lords 
 who sat with them in the upper chamber. To support his 
 ridiculous invention, James at the same time made innova- 
 tions in the Anglican church: he, indeed, only desired to 
 mark more distinctly the separation between the reformation 
 of Henry VIII. and that of the puritans; but all the adherents 
 of the Anglican church exclaimed that he wanted to return 
 to the Eoman idolatry. They understood by this, Catholicism ; 
 and the recent gunpowder plot had for ever rendered this 
 religion execrable to ail classes of the nation. 
 
 As to the lower chamber, whose aversion to prelacy had 
 already been manifested during the preceding reign, James had 
 no sooner propounded to it his doctrine of divine right, than it 
 plunged into this new field of discussion, full of resolution, and 
 piously excited by the example of the monarch, to discuss the 
 moral titles of royalty. The more ardent presbyterians zeal- 
 ously exercising the utmost of a vain and pedantic science, 
 wearied themselves for along time in their attempts to attain the 
 height of James's incomprehensible arguments; but the 
 1603 more intelligent members who sat among them, kept 
 *° their attention fixed on the positive and easily accessible 
 questions which arose from the proposition itself. If the 
 king really held from God this absolute power which he desired 
 to share with the bishops, what was the law? what was the par- 
 liament which concurred in making the law ? What difference 
 was there between laws discussed in parliament, and royal ordi- 
 nances promulgated in the absence of parliament? Was the 
 object of these ordinances simply to prescribe the execution 
 of the laws made by parliament, or did they emanate from a 
 legislative authority superior to all parliamentary deliberation? 
 Were the subjects under the obligation of paying the taxes 
 imposed by the royal ordinances? If so, whence the custom 
 of demanding subsidies in the house of commons? Was this 
 chamber simply a consulting assembly with which the king- 
 could dispense, or one which was to instruct him as to the 
 interests of the people? And, according as the assembly 
 held its powers from the king or the nation, was it the king's 
 ministers or the magistrates elected by the towns and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 boroughs, in virtue of their charters, who were to send forth 
 the writs of election? By an inevitable concatenation, 
 each of these questions involved a crowd of other questions, 
 and thus for the first time the government was challenged in 
 all its parts, the administration in its most minute details. 
 Having once taken this ground, the house of commons was 
 kept there by those who had conducted it thither, and who 
 thenceforth were in the position to direct it. Converting 
 into an historical question, the religious question of Divine 
 Right, the parliamentary opposition armed itself with all the 
 testimonies presented by past times against the present pre- 
 tensions of royal power and favourable to its own claims. 
 Then were asserted, as the common heritage of the two 
 chambers, all the acts which recalled the ancient power of 
 the upper chamber; then were elevated into fundamental 
 principles, into distinct attributes, into inviolable privileges, 
 simple forms before regarded as indifferent, but now better 
 appreciated. Points unperceived during the former existence 
 of parliament, became of the utmost importance in fixing its 
 career for the future, and the opposition hastened to seize 
 them, in order to engage more surely in the contest provoked 
 by James I. 
 
 The chamber became enlightened by this laborious re- 
 search after facts; men were formed in its bosom of great 
 tact in discovering, of great ability in drawing conclusions 
 from them. James repented that he had commenced a dis- 
 cussion which, in spite of him, took this direction; he grew 
 weary of not being able to reply, and when it was too late, 
 sought to impose silence. He dissolved the parliament of 
 1621, and with his own hands destroyed the journals of 
 the commons; but three years afterwards, he was obliged to 
 acknowledge the privileges of the lower chamber, as 
 inscribed in these journals, and from that time forth it . * 
 
 became a maxim of the constitution: "That the liberties, 
 franchises, privileges and jurisdictions of parliament, are the 
 ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the sub- 
 jects of England, and that the arduous and urgent affairs con- 
 cerning the king, state, and defence of the realm, and of the 
 church of England, and of the maintenance and making laws, 
 and redress of mischiefs and grievances, which daily happen 
 within this realm, are proper subjects and matters of counsel 
 
 c 
 
18 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 and debate in parliament. That in handling and proceeding 
 in such business, every member of parliament hath, and of 
 right ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, 
 reason, and bring the same to conclusion. That the com- 
 mons in parliament have likewise liberty and freedom to 
 treat of these matters, in such order as in their judgments 
 shall seem fittest. That every member of the said house hath 
 like freedom from all impeachment, imprisonment, and 
 molestation, other than by censure of the house itself, for or 
 concerning any speaking, reasoning, or declaring of any 
 matter or matters touching the parliament or parliament 
 business. And that if any of the said members be complained 
 of or questioned for anything done or said in parliament, the 
 same is to be showed to the king, by the advice and consent of 
 all the commons assembled in parliament, before the king 
 give credit to any private information." 
 
 V. It was under the existence of the same circumstances 
 which had compelled James, in the last year of his reign, to 
 alienate this immense portion of absolute power, that is to 
 say, in the midst of embarrassments caused by a disordered 
 administration, the expensive caprices of the favourite Buck- 
 ingham, a minister odious to England, and the ill-success of a 
 war rashly undertaken and still more foolishly conducted, that 
 Charles I. assembled his first parliament. The commons 
 1621 ^ not hesitate, in pursuance of their recently acknow- 
 2g28 ledged right, to demand an account of the state of affairs, 
 both external and internal. Charles at first hesitated to 
 contest this right; but soon becoming dissatisfied, he decided 
 upon governing alone, ordered levies of taxes, and re-established 
 the monopolies which James had in some measure abandoned. 
 He had adopted his father's doctrine of Divine right, and his 
 plans in favour of the episcopacy; but more in earnest and 
 more firm than he, he desired to impose as a master that which 
 James had sought to establish as a sophist. At least, until 
 his time, absolute kings had managed to retain in their in- 
 terests those magistrates who, in the extraordinary tribunals, 
 in the high courts of Westminster, and in the inferior courts, 
 sanctioned despotism by condemning even complaints raised 
 against it. They formed a body, formidable despite their 
 corruption, brought near to the nobility by their riches, 
 and placed by their education in a position above the middle 
 
INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 class. Charles, by introducing the bishops into high judicial 
 functions, even to the exclusion. ,of nearly one-half the lay- 
 men who had formerly exercised them, turned against his 
 government that talent and sk{ll which had so long been 
 exercised in torturing every law in favour of despotism, and 
 in substituting judicial fictions fo# justice. 
 
 The discontent of the lawyer^ then was added to that of 
 the great lords, enemies of the bishops, to the legitimate fears 
 of the wealthy members of the ^glican church, nobles, and 
 citizens, to the enlightened views, of a society which began to 
 study the ancients, to appréciai e thé genius of Shakespere, 
 the learned science of Bacon, aiid the arts of modern Italy; 
 lastly, to the need of security, fçr<t by the powerful commer- 
 cial companies which already ' rivalled the Dutch and the 
 Spaniards in the two Indies. At the head of the religious 
 enemies of absolute power, and apposed to the bishops and 
 the blind courtiers whose support had driven royalty on to 
 this rock, a legitimate aristocracy* was formed, that of talents, 
 of enlightenment, and of patriotism adorning birth and riches; 
 most conveniently placed to ser^3 as the organ of national 
 interests, speaking at need the language of the court, and 
 competent to treat with it on terms of equality. The better 
 informed portion of the upper house, and the rich and 
 titled portion of the lower chamber, represented in the par- 
 liament of 1628 that power formed of new elements and 
 old forces, which from the state passed to the nation. 
 Little mattered it now that Charles I. convoking, despite his 
 own feelings, this parliament, and declaring to it his indigence, 
 added, that he knew where to obtain money, and only asked 
 for it in order to manifest his royal condescension. The 
 attributes of the commons were now defined, and it was for 
 the people to make them respected by exercising their rights, 
 and refusing to pay taxes which were not sanctioned by the 
 commons. The famous Petition of Right was, in this respect, 
 a recommendation addressed to the people; it was for the 
 national liberties what the act of 1621 had been for the pri- 
 vileges of the commons. Its numerous clauses, established 
 by a long enumeration of ancient acts and statutes, that 
 nothing new was claimed, and the claim itself was the expres- 
 sion of that which the wants and interests of England at this 
 epoch most imperiously called for. 
 
 c2 
 
20 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 " We demand," said the commons, " that no man hereafter 
 be compelled to make o±' ^ r ield any gift, token, benevolence, 
 tax, or such like charge, without common consent by act of 
 parliament; and U 
 
 " That none else be called to make answer, or take such 
 oath, or to give attendance, or be confined or otherwise 
 molested or disquieted concerning the same, or for refusal 
 thereof; and 
 
 " That no freeman, in ariy such manner as is before-men- 
 tioned, be imprisoned or detained; and 
 
 " That your majesty will be pleased to remove the said 
 soldiers and mariners quarte£3d in the different counties, and 
 lodged in men's houses again!* their will, and that your people 
 may not be so burdened in tine to come; and 
 
 " That all commissions for proceeding by martial law may 
 be revoked and annulled, atfd that thereafter no commission 
 of like nature may issue fort*; to any persons whatever, to be 
 executed as aforesaid, least! by colour of them, any of your 
 majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to death contrary to 
 the laws and franchise of thta land." 
 
 The upper chamber approved this declaration; the 
 1628 ki n g gave it an equivocal sanction, but a report having 
 1640. spread that he merely wished to gain time, and that his 
 minister, Buckingham, was negotiating for troops with 
 Germany, the passions which animated the inferior ranks of the 
 lower chamber burst forth; they re-echoed without, excited the 
 people, and menaced the court, more especially the favourite, 
 Buckingham. Under the preceding reign, this minister, to 
 destroy a rival, had induced the commons to demand his im- 
 peachment, pursuant to a right which they had not yet ven- 
 tured to adopt; they now made use of this right against him- 
 self. Charles interposed, by ordering the dissolution of par- 
 liament; he treated the commons as a factious assembly, and 
 declared, that for the future he should regard as extreme 
 insolence any demand for a new convocation. Some time 
 after this Buckingham was assassinated; it was one of those 
 crimes for the execution of which strong minds are found, 
 when nations can no longer obtain justice from the laws. 
 Charles did not judge of it otherwise, when he witnessed the 
 joy which was everywhere manifested. 
 
 With the death of Buckingham ended a system of disorder, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 21 
 
 of prodigality, of unmeaning violence, as contrary to the 
 interests as to the inclinations of Charles. Still young, 1628 
 esteemed for the excellence of his private conduct, speak- 16 ^q 
 ing of the royal authority not as a tyrant, but as a man 
 dazzled with the majesty of a rank which he deemed the state 
 itself; misled by the prejudices of birth, but compelling 
 those who approached him to acknowledge in him intentions 
 better than his acts ; rendered interesting by the distresses 
 and difficulties he underwent in a situation which he had 
 not created for himself, but which the violence and errors 
 of the preceding reign had prepared for him; having some 
 sort of excuse in ^that which the demands of the com- 
 mons, founded upon ancient facts, presented contrary to the 
 customs of a less distant period, he found even in the ranks 
 of the opposition men who devoted themselves to govern 
 after Buckingham, and to struggle against public discontent. 
 Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, one of those whose 
 eloquence had been most distinguished in the discussion on 
 the bill of rights, was of the number. All at once arming 
 himself with a new and strange resolution, separating the king 
 from the court, ready to do all things for him — nothing 
 for it, ignorant, perhaps, that to restore the royal prerogative 
 he must betray the country, he entered w T ith ardour upon a 
 plan of government which for a time set aside the national 
 representation. But when the state of the public mind, and 
 the absence of physical means, had taught him that this 
 system was impracticable, he drew himself up with his vigour of 
 character against the difficulties which arose from men and 
 from circumstances, and adopted all the consequences of a fixed 
 determination. Archbishop Laud adopted the same views 
 with the same ardent zeal, and, moreover, undertook to effect 
 those changes in the Anglican church which had been 
 commenced by James I., and which were desired by the 
 bishops and by the king. * j 
 
 To the ordinary taxes arbitrarily levied, to the old mono- 
 polies re-established, were added new taxes, new monopolies, 
 extending even to articles of the first necessity for the 
 people ; and other expedients, such as compositions for 
 the order of knighthood, the verifications of titles to pro- 
 perty came to the aid of the treasury. An army of tax- 
 gatherers, inspectors, and subaltern judges, carried the royal 
 
22 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 ordinances into execution. All the nonconforming protest- 
 ants, and even members of the church, who had declared 
 against the new ceremonies, were compelled to attend the 
 churches. The court of high commission, the northern 
 court, and the star chamber, dictated, by numerous con- 
 demnations, obedience to the king and the bishops; words 
 spoken against them were punished as though they had been 
 published writings; the refusal of loans as the purchase of 
 goods at other than monopoly prices and from the mono- 
 polists. The mass of the nation bore this patiently for a long 
 
 time, on account of the well understood inutility of half 
 1628 attempts, and the difficulty of passing from submission 
 1640. t0 rev °to« Yet two kinds of individual resistance, the 
 
 one religious, the other political, did not fail to prove the 
 energy of the wants and feelings to which endurance did 
 violence. The first, more popular, more daring, and with 
 more appearance of a certainty of success, was marked by the 
 trials of Lilburne, Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, who were 
 ignominiously mutilated before the eyes of the people; the 
 second, that of the rich classes, more temperate, more respect- 
 ful, more calmly calculating between present evils and fore- 
 seen excesses, was represented by the memorable refusal of 
 John Hampden. It was at last from Scotland, that focus of 
 presbyterian doctrines, that after nine years of sufferings, 
 common to the three kingdoms, came the blow which was to 
 overthrow tyranny. 
 
 The cry of insurrection arose in the same church where 
 was made the first attempt to introduce the Anglican li- 
 turgy. At the cry, No pope! No bishops ! the people of all 
 classes hastened to Edinburgh, and there, in a common 
 council, was drawn up and signed that famous covenant by 
 which the nobility, citizens, priests, the inhabitants of the 
 country districts, swore never to suffer the establishment of 
 episcopacy in Scotland, which they denounced as equally con- 
 demnable with papacy, equally the enemy of national liberty. 
 To uphold this oath, the Scotch organized a fine army, which 
 was promptly disciplined under the command of officers 
 formed to the trade of arms by the continental wars. The 
 activity of Strafford, who came in all haste from Ireland on 
 the news of the insurrection, could not destroy it in its birth. 
 On the contrary, the troops which were collected and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 23 
 
 marched to the Scottish frontier became also affected with 
 the general discontent. Two years passed in vain efforts, 
 menaces, and intrigues to destroy the Scottish league, or to 
 raise against it the ancient animosities of England. The 
 monarchists thought to interest the parliament in the cause 
 of power, by making a great outcry about a correspondence be- 
 tween the Scottish covenanters and the government of France. 
 The parliament made a temporary reappearance, during 
 which it manifested an entire indifference to the outrages of 
 which Charles complained, and only spoke of the grievances 
 of the people. Laud and Strafford, incapable, as the latter 
 expressed it, of cajoling the ill-temper of the adversaries of 
 authority, obstinately had recourse to the last extremities, 
 and, when these clearly failed, consented to a regular convo- 
 cation of parliament. Already the Scotch had passed the 
 border. Every where well received, and announcing in their 
 manifestos that they only desired to lay their just complaints 
 at the king's feet; that they came as brothers to deliver the 
 English from the tyranny of the bishops, they conducted 
 themselves in every respect according to those declarations. 
 Since the parliament of Rights, the king had reduced every- 
 thing between his people and himself to a question of force; 
 the parliament having now for army the Scottish insur- 
 gents, while the king had neither devoted troops nor 1(U0 
 the money to pay them, a great revolution was effected 1641 
 by this single fact: absolute power no longer existed. 
 
 VI. Royalty still remained, powerless and resigned; the 
 opening parliament was about to have intrusted to it the task 
 of assigning its limits; a perilous duty, which it, however, 
 entered upon with confidence, sure of its intentions and not 
 doubting its capacity. And first it put on its trial the system 
 which had oppressed England during the last eleven years. 
 The resentment of the nation, the dignity of the lower cham- 
 ber insulted in the persons of the majority of its members, 
 demanded, it was said, a striking reparation; the future re- 
 quired a great example. Forty committees applied themselves 
 eagerly to the task of seeking out all that had been done 
 against the law; thousands of petitions and of statements 
 addressed to the committees, enlightened them and urged 
 them on in this vast process. From disgraceful acts, they 
 passed to the punishment of the agents of all classes who had 
 
24 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 committed them, and whom they designated by the general 
 name of delinquents. Strafford and Laud were criminals 
 too marked to be spared; Strafford, more especially, the most 
 detested as the most firm — and, moreover, as a renegade. At 
 his trial, he defended himself. Rare power of an oratorical 
 talent formerly dear to the people! He embarrassed the 
 lawyers, shielding himself with those very laws which he had 
 trodden under foot; he who had so often shown himself 
 merciless, drew tears from the eyes of his hearers. These last 
 and sublime efforts rendered his former virtue still more 
 matter of regret, but did not save him; Charles allowed 
 the execution of the sentence which condemned him to death. 
 Among all the consents which had been demanded of him, 
 this alone he was not permitted to grant. 
 
 When Strafford had expiated with his head the brief 
 triumphs he had secured for royal authority, that authority 
 itself lay exposed to attack, and soon lost more than it had 
 usurped. The abolition of the monopolies and of arbitrary 
 taxes, the condemnation of the compositions for knighthood, 
 and of the encroachments of the royal forests, the suppression 
 of all the extraordinary tribunals, civil and religious, the res- 
 toration to all their rights of the citizens whom these had con- 
 demned, declared loudly enough that royalty henceforth might 
 do none of these things. The point to be determined now 
 was, what it could still constitutionally do, and here a natural 
 indiscretion was near being committed. It was felt to be ne- 
 cessary to fix the royal prerogative ; they mistook one way to 
 this for another: they began to extend the power of the par- 
 liament; they desired that it should assemble, at least, every 
 three years; that it should alone have the power of adjourn- 
 ing and dissolving itself; should vote the subsidies and su- 
 perintend their expenditure; that it should interfere in 
 affairs until then regarded as the province of the privy coun- 
 cil; that it should share in the nomination of the judges, and 
 in the authority of the bishops and of the king in church mat- 
 ters; that it should, at need, have the power to issue ordi- 
 nances having the force of law; finally, that it should dispose 
 of the military power of the kingdom. This last pretension 
 involved the entire ruin of the royal power, and Charles, ac- 
 cordingly, when he arrived at this point, refused the sanction 
 he had given to the rest. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 26 
 
 The circumstances of this refusal were very serious. Ireland 
 suddenly entering, in pursuance of her own particular views, 
 into the revolutionary movement which was agitating England 
 and Scotland, had j ust massacred forty thousand English 
 soldiers, public functionaries, or settlers, who in her 
 eyes represented at once internal tyranny and a foreign yoke. 
 Ireland was catholic, the king was accused of a tendency to 
 popery ; the forty thousand slaughtered English were protest- 
 ants ; the Irish insurrection, in the eyes of prejudiced people, 
 seemed, accordingly, to be a catholic crime, and the king, who 
 lost by it all that Strafford had done for him in Ireland, was 
 deemed to have secretly excited it. How then could he be 
 intrusted with the charge of reducing the rebels to order? It 
 was for this that the government desired the disposal of the 
 military forces. The king remained firm; then commenced, 
 between him and the parliament, a war of declarations and 
 of messages which soon proved the impossibility of coming to 
 an understanding. From the onset, a threatening trans- 
 formation appeared to have taken place in the spirit of the 
 parliament; the first leaders of the two chambers, the authors 
 of the Bill of Rights, had found in the ancient constitution 
 wherewith to overthrow and punish the tyranny of Strafford, 
 but not wherewith to prevent the return of that tyranny. 
 Still attached to royalty, and wishing to preserve episcopacy 
 as its necessary support, they yielded with regret to the 
 necessity of seizing upon all the various powers, the only 
 method, according to their view, of examining at leisure 
 which of them could be judiciously left to the crown. So 
 long as Charles had concurred in their political reforms, they 
 had pursued it without any anxiety of conscience ; but when 
 it became necessary to overcome his resistance on the militia 
 bill, several of them would proceed no further; the rest, more 
 deeply committed, or more intent upon their object, and 
 courted for their talents, continued to progress with the 
 nation, but shared their influence with the party less 
 numerous in parliament, who took their religious convention- 
 ality for enlightenment, who aimed at the reform formerly 
 expected from the accession of James I., and whom the in- 
 surrection of Ireland authorised in attacking episcopacy, 
 thenceforth confounded with popery. The energy of this 
 new majority manifested itself by the act known under the 
 
26 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 name of The Remonstrance, an act dictated far less by the 
 hope of obtaining the king's consent to the point then in dis- 
 cussion, than by the desire of animating the people against a 
 resolution which appeared irrevocable. 
 
 The parliament announced the existence of a party 
 1641 hostile to the nation, and composed of papists, of the 
 1643 bishops, of that portion of the clergy which it designated 
 as corrupt, of the courtiers, of the king's councillors, and 
 of other evil disposed persons. It set forth in minute detail, in 
 a language full of hatred, all that this party had done against the 
 religion and the liberties of the country, under the ministry of 
 Buckingham, and then under that of Laud and Strafford. 
 It then set forth with complacency all that, with the help of 
 God, itself had done, since its convocation in 1638, to repair 
 the evils caused by tyranny, to extirpate abuses, to establish 
 the authority of the laws, and to extricate the king from the 
 embarrassments of every kind into which he had been 
 plunged by his evil councillors. It spoke of its own power, 
 sometimes as momentary usurpations rendered necessary by 
 circumstances, sometimes as attributes legitimately exercised; 
 and, finally, it set forth its ulterior views. 
 
 As to religion, it said: " We confess our intention is, 
 and our endeavours have been, to reduce within bounds that 
 exorbitant power which the prelates have assumed unto 
 themselves, so contrary both to the word of God and to the 
 
 laws of the land And we declare that it is far from our 
 
 purpose or desire to let loose the golden reins of discipline 
 and government in the church, to leave private persons and 
 particular congregations to take up what form of divine 
 worship they please, for we hold it requisite that there should 
 be throughout the realm a conformity to that order which 
 the laws enjoin according to the word of God. And we 
 desire to unburden the consciences of men of needless and 
 superstitious ceremonies, to suppress innovations, and to take 
 away the monuments of idolatry. And the better to effect 
 the intended reformation, we desire there may be a general 
 synod of the most grave, pious, learned, and judicious divines 
 of this island, assisted with some from foreign parts, pro- 
 fessing the same religion with us, who may consider of all 
 things necessary for the peace and good government of the 
 church, and represent the results of their consultations unto 
 
INTRODUCTION. 27 
 
 the parliament, to be there allowed of and confirmed, and 
 receive the stamp of authority, thereby to find passage 
 and obedience throughout the kingdom. Many excellent 
 laws and provisions are in preparation for removing the in- 
 ordinate power, vexation, and usurpation of bishops, for 
 reforming the pride and idleness of many of the clergy, for 
 easing the people of unnecessary ceremonies in religion, for 
 censuring and removing unworthy and unprofitable ministers, 
 and for maintaining godly and diligent preachers through 
 the kingdom." 
 
 This was declaring that the presbyterian form of wor- 
 ship should soon be substituted for that of the bishops. 16A1 
 The latter accordingly found themselves obliged to -^3 
 quit the upper chamber, and to protest against any- 
 thing that should be done there without their concurrence. 
 
 As to the state, " We desire," said the parliament, " the esta- 
 blishing and ordering the king's revenue, that so the abuse of 
 officers and superfluity of expenses may be cut off, and 
 necessary disbursements for his majesty's honour, the defence 
 and government of the kingdom, may be more certainly 
 provided for; the regulating of courts of justice, and abridg- 
 ing both the delays and charges of law-suits; that his 
 majesty be petitioned to grant a standing commission to 
 some choice men named in parliament, who may take notice 
 of the increase of papists, their counsels and proceedings, and 
 use all due means, by execution of the laws, to prevent all 
 mischievous designs against the peace and safety of this king- 
 dom. For the better preservation of the laws and liberties of 
 this kingdom, that all illegal grievances and exactions be pre- 
 sented and punished at the sessions and assizes. And that 
 judges and justices be very careful to give this in charge to 
 the grand juries, and both the sheriff and justices to be sworn 
 to the due execution of the Petition of Right and other laws. 
 
 " That his majesty be humbly petitioned by both houses to 
 employ such councillors, ambassadors, and other ministers in 
 managing his business, at home and abroad, as the parliament 
 may have cause to confide in, without which we cannot give 
 his majesty such supplies for support of his own estate, nor 
 such assistance to the protestant party beyond sea as is 
 desired. It may often fall out, that the commons may 
 have just cause to take exceptions at some men for being 
 
28 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 councillors, and yet not charge those men with crimes, for 
 there be grounds of diffidence (distrust) which be not in 
 proof. There are others, which, though they may be proved, 
 yet are not legally criminal. To be a known favourer of 
 papists, or to have been very forward in defending or coun- 
 tenancing some great offenders questioned in parliament, or 
 to speak contemptuously of either house of parliament, or of 
 parliamentary proceedings; or such as are factors, or agents, 
 for any foreign prince of another religion; such as are justly 
 suspected to get councillors' places, or any other of trust 
 concerning public employment, for money; for all these and 
 divers others we may have reason to be earnest with his 
 majesty not to put his great affairs into their hands." 
 
 Then taking into consideration the interests of the 
 16 ^- commerce of England, the authors of the remonstrance 
 
 to 
 
 1643. announced (acting upon the ideas of that period) the 
 intention to prevent the exportation of gold and silver, 
 to equalize the exchange between England and other nations, 
 to give greater circulation to the commodities of the country, 
 to increase its manufactures, and to place commerce in a jus ft 
 balance, " in order," said they, " that the capital of the 
 country be not diminished, as has happened several years 
 through pure negligence." 
 
 Next, with a view to the interests of the lower classes, the 
 remonstrance urged the necessity of encouraging the herring 
 fishery, which furnished subsistence to the poor, and kept up 
 a nursery of seamen capable of serving the king in cases of 
 emergency. 
 
 As to each of these articles the remonstrance observed, 
 with bitterness, that the malignant party was the only 
 obstacle to ameliorations. 
 
 Thus, in the minds of the authors of the remonstrance, 
 reform in the church against episcopacy, reform in the govern- 
 ment against the king, the commercial aggrandisement of 
 England against an ignorant, incapable, and corrupt adminis- 
 tration, presented themselves as three great tasks to fulfil, 
 and the entire revolution was resolved upon. The presby- 
 terian majority in parliament, as well as out of doors, 
 were eager to commence it, thinking they should be readily 
 able to terminate it when the king should consent to the 
 abolition of the bishops; to obtain this consent, they declared 
 
INTRODUCTION. 29 
 
 that it was simply a form; they then went so far as to say 
 that it was not necessary, that the will of the parliament was 
 the law, and that the king must submit to it. This last pre- 
 tension shocked those who desired neither parliamentary 
 omnipotence nor royal absolutism; it forced the various 
 elements, hitherto united against the latter abuse, to separate 
 and distribute themselves, and thenceforth the king had a 
 party resolved on asserting for him, and, if need were, 
 restoring to him by the sword, rights consecrated by the past, 
 equally with those of the parliament and of the people. 
 
 VII. When the king hoisted, at Nottingham, his royal 16 ^ 3 
 standard, in signal of a still haughty distress, the thirty- 
 two lords, the sixty members of the commons, and the ministers, 
 who answered to his appeal, formed, with the bishops, the 
 catholic lords, and the great officers of the crown, the head of 
 the party called cavaliers. The regular troops which re- 
 mained faithful, a part also of the country nobles, who, for 
 thirty years past, altogether apart from what was passing 
 around them, had still lived in the pure monarchical doc- 
 trines of the time of Elizabeth, some adventurers, the younger 
 members of the universities, promptly formed an army 
 ready to act for this party. The mass of the popu- 16i3 
 lation glorying in the name of Roundheads, given in ji^'g 
 derision to the national party by the cavaliers, sup- 
 ported the parliament, who took possession of the revenues of 
 the crown, and invested a commission of its members with 
 all the functions of government. The women divested them- 
 selves of their ornaments to furnish means. The men filled 
 with enthusiasm the ranks of the militia. The leading chiefs 
 of the parliamentary army were naturally those members of 
 the two chambers who, by their fortune, could contribute 
 most towards the expenses of the war, the great lords, and 
 the rich proprietors, nearly all of whom were presbyterians. 
 In the secondary ranks, illustrious orators and soldiers 
 by trade took their stations by the side of the members of 
 the lower chamber, until then better known by their religious 
 and patriotic zeal than by their talents. 
 
 One of the latter was Oliver Cromwell. In the brilliant 
 debates in which the rights of the people and of the parlia- 
 ment had been proclaimed, this man had been remarked 
 for the invectives which he launched with awkward vehe- 
 
30 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 mence against the king, the papists, and the courtiers. His 
 activity, displayed whenever there was occasion to watch or 
 disconcert the intrigues of the court, had afterwards recom- 
 mended him to the more influential members, and given him 
 credit among those who believed that the queen, a professed 
 catholic, led the king; that the king, to please her, had or- 
 dered the massacre in Ireland ; that at first he had raised so few 
 objections to the numerous demands advanced, merely because 
 
 he hoped to regain all by some great act of treachery; 
 1643 that he desired to have the charge of reducing 
 3646. Ireland, only in order that he might conduct troops 
 
 thither, and then return with them to slaughter all the 
 protestants of England. These suspicions pervaded the whole 
 presbyterian body, and caused them to look upon war as an 
 evil for which the king would be responsible; they inflamed 
 the hatred of other sectaries, of a more sombre enthusiasm, 
 amongst them, the independents, enemies to all political and 
 religious hierarchy, to royalty as well as to episcopacy, to 
 the aristocracy as well as to the priesthood. Of these, Crom- 
 well was the hope. 
 
 In the first encounters between the king's party and the 
 parliamentary army, the latter could not stand their ground; 
 their cavalry, hastily made up of all who could manage a 
 horse — in a great measure of grooms — could not withstand that 
 of the king, composed of gentlemen as brave as they were 
 passionately devoted to the cause. Among all the experienced 
 men who commanded for the parliament, not one remarked 
 this cause of the difference between the two armies. Crom- 
 well pointed it out to them, and said they must oppose to the 
 men of honour who served the king, not valets, but men who 
 fought for God, for their families, and for their property; 
 and although he had never served himself, he offered to 
 organize a body according to this idea, which should decide 
 the struggle in favour of those who had best comprehended 
 it. He selected from among the petty proprietors, the rich 
 farmers, and the tradesmen, men whose principles he shared, 
 and whose conduct and energy were known to him. He 
 disciplined them, excited, instructed, inured them with him- 
 self to warfare; he ruled them by the ascendancy of a cool, 
 exact mind in an ardent temperament, and by a force of will 
 which seemed to such men a sort of divine inspiration. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 31 
 
 Whenever the parliamentary army was beaten, Cromwell's 
 regiment was sure to be victorious on some point of the 
 battle field, and after every engagement more and more 
 recruits offered themselves for this body, which fought so 
 well, and whose discipline and piety were worthy of the cause 
 of the country and of religion, elsewhere so ill defended. 
 It accordingly soon became necessary to make the simple 
 leader of volunteers, one of the parliamentary generals, and his 
 cavalry one of the principal corps of the army. 
 
 When the parliament declared itself presbyterian, and, in 
 order to procure help from the Scotch, adopted the principles 
 of their covenant, Cromwell's regiment was merely a party 
 in the army. The presbyterians, strong in their turn, made 
 tyrannical laws, establishing throughout the three kingdoms 
 their religious uniformity. The independents, to escape the 
 persecution, came to serve under Cromwell, whom they con- 
 sidered one of themselves. Cromwell offered them an ayslum^ 
 interested, as he believed them to be, in doing as he did, in 
 creating for themselves titles by services; in becoming first 
 among the troops, as he sought to become first among the 
 captains. He was not mistaken; these new-comers, 
 although they did not, any more than he, like the 1643 
 Scotch auxiliaries, or the noble presbyterian generals 2646 
 who commanded, thought only of the common cause. 
 Their intrepidity and discipline at length brought victory to 
 the parliamentary flag. 
 
 The Anglo- Scottish presbyterians then desired peace: 
 wishing, above all things, that their religious revolution 
 should be adopted, they almost entirely abandoned the poli- 
 tical revolution. Now, it was for this that the independents 
 had fought; transferring their religious creed into the poli- 
 tical order, they condemned all powers as usurped from 
 Christ; they awaited His coming upon earth, and would not 
 accept a peace which would prevent them from preparing 
 for what they called His reign. Alone they would not have 
 influenced the nation, but the aversion with which their 
 absurd ideas inspired them against royalty corresponded with 
 the views of a political party, composed of enlightened men, 
 of late united with the presbyterians against episcopal 
 tyranny, and who, seeing the embarrassment felt by the 
 latter in at once defending their own innovations against the 
 
32 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 king, and in preventing other innovators from going beyond 
 them, had boldly advanced to broader principles. They 
 rejected all state religion, whether catholic, episcopal, or 
 presbyterian ; every one, according to them, had a right 
 openly to profess his belief; and as to royalty, whether 
 1643 or not j t m ight be deemed advisable to come to terms 
 1646 with it, they desired that it should be considered, not 
 as having violated such or such a liberty, recorded 
 in mouldy charters, but as having broken an original con- 
 tract, which had made the people submit to it, and which they 
 founded on simple reason. Writers — amongst others, Milton, 
 the greatest genius of the time — spread these doctrines; mem- 
 bers of parliament maintained them to the face of the pres- 
 byterian majority; Cromwell and his officers professed them 
 in the army, where lay the strength of the religious and 
 political independents. Certain of being sacrificed if peace 
 was made between the presbyterians and the king, they 
 represented it as an act of weakness, or as the forced result 
 of bad management. 
 
 The people were divided between them and the presby- 
 terians: if they listened to the latter when they declared that 
 peace alone could terminate a struggle so ruinous to the 
 country, they united their indignation with the former 
 when they represented that warfare without energy, and 
 mal-administration, had infinitely prolonged the duration of 
 the sacrifices which the people had imposed upon themselves, 
 and had compromised the cause for which they had endured 
 them. Again, the presbyterians still persisted, even in 
 making war against the king, in affixing his name to their 
 acts. Now, a royalist parliament assembled by the king at 
 Oxford, acted on the same principle, and in the same form, 
 and the nation might thus be placed in doubt on which side was, 
 if not justice, at least the law. The independents made use of 
 this to urge the necessity of new principles; it was necessary, 
 they said, that all should regard royalty as they regarded it; 
 that the war should be carried on with more energy; that the 
 army should be reorganized; that the generals should be more 
 closely dependent upon the parliament; and that with this 
 object they should be taken from the ranks of the army, and 
 not from the chambers. Upon this last point the indepen- 
 dents satisfied themselves by the famous Self-denying ordinance 
 
INTRODUCTION. 33 
 
 supported in parliament with so much vigour and subtlety by 
 Cromwell. While the noble and presbyterian generals, taken 
 by surprise, withdrew from the command, Cromwell alone, 
 among the officers, members of parliament, remained at the head 
 of his regiment; and before there was time to protest against 
 this exception, merited it by an important success against 
 the king. His reputation was already great enough for him 
 to have aspired to the command-in-chief, but he desired 
 rather to appear to obey a man whom he was sure of govern- 
 ing, and contented himself with advancing and distributing 
 throughout the various regiments the officers and soldiers 
 who had served under his command. 
 
 The reorganization which placed the independents in pos- 
 session of the military employments rapidly bore its fruits. The 
 royalist party was defeated upon the field of Naseby. The 
 king took refuge in the camp of the Scotch, who in- ^^ 
 spired him with less fear than their allies; but the 
 Scotch delivered him up to these, thinking that they could 
 more effectually induce him to recognise their worship and 
 their liberties. 
 
 In England, the battle of Naseby disposed all minds in 
 favour of a party which had so soon kept its word. At this 
 juncture, there were to be replaced in the lower chamber 
 one hundred and thirty members, who had retired at the 
 commencement of the war. The choice fell upon men belong- 
 ing to the independent party, and upon some of the plebeians 
 who had become chiefs of the army. These new comers, dis- 
 playing on every occasion a vigour and capacity which seemed 
 to disappear from among the presbyterians in proportion as 
 they w T ent more and more beyond their mark, made their way 
 into the committee of government, formed of the members of 
 the two chambers. Masters of these two posts, the army and 
 the council, the independents commenced against the king, 
 against the Scotch auxiliaries, and against the presbyterian 
 church, a system of impeachments, soon followed by open war. 
 The presbyterians recovered some energy to defend them- 
 selves. Having with them the Scottish army, the citizen class, 
 and the majority of the parliament, and disposing of the 
 king's person, they imagined that by coming to terms with 
 him, by disbanding part of the army, and sending the remain- 
 der to Ireland, they could maintain the revolution as they 
 
 D 
 
34 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 had designed it. But on the one hand the king, hoping to 
 profit by the misunderstanding, made every effort to gain 
 time; on the other, the army, learning that the majority of the 
 parliament thought of disbanding it, formed itself into deli- 
 berating bodies, into assemblies of soldiers, elected by their 
 comrades under the title of agitators, and into a higher class 
 of clubs, composed of officers. Threatening petitions were 
 sent from these military assemblies. The parliamentary 
 presbyterians mistook the character of these turbulent protests, 
 as the court formerly misconceived the demands of the people; 
 they voted several months pay, whereas it was power that the 
 soldiery aimed at. 
 
 Cromwell was, as it were, the connecting link between the 
 independents of the army and those of the parliament. Always 
 going backwards and forwards from one to the other, praying, 
 preaching, calling for the reign of Christ with the agitators, 
 and with his parliamentary friends fervently expatiating on 
 the idea of a republic, and of the sovereignty of the people, 
 over all he exercised an immense power of opinion. Reducing 
 the question between the two parties to the small number 
 of points upon which the matter was to be decided by force or 
 by address, he saw that to deprive the presbyterians of the 
 support of the Scotch and of the disposal of the king's person, 
 would be to conquer. Intrigues, aided by several just com- 
 plaints, alienated the Scotch; a daring coup -de-main rendered 
 the king a prisoner of the army, without the participation of 
 Cromwell being perceived, and without the mass of the 
 nation understanding what would be the result of all this. 
 
 The parliamentary presbyterians, who saw it better, loudly 
 proclaimed it. Henceforward, nothing remained for Crom- 
 well and his party but to expel them from the parliament. 
 The presbyterians were strong in the city of London; their 
 old popularity, founded upon so great and such noble services, 
 raised the citizens against the independents, who were the 
 minority in the house. The latter hereupon played the 
 part of oppressed victims; to the number of sixty, they pro- 
 ceeded to the army, which, in conducting them back to Lon- 
 don, had thus a pretext of being driven to use force, the last 
 argument between parties. The sixty members reinstalled, 
 amidst the plaudits of the army, who imposed silence on the 
 London citizens, in their turn excluded eleven of the most 
 
INTRODUCTION. 35 
 
 distinguished presbyterian members, and manifested an eager- 
 ness to come to a conclusion with the king. An astounded, 
 uncertain majority formed around them, disposed to act with 
 the system of expurgation which now established itself. 
 They voted four bills, which were to be presented to the 
 king as articles of peace. If, said the independents, he fail 
 to recognise in this negotiation a last effort of the long en- 
 durance of parliament, we will proceed to a last resolution. 
 
 But what was this extreme resolution to be? the total 
 overthrow of royalty? Beyond that the enemies of the pres- 
 byterians had no views or opinions in common. The ambi- 
 tious class, with Cromwell at their head, objected to men's 
 looking so far forward: God, said they, would give them in- 
 spiration when the proper time arrived; others, enlightened 
 patriots, insisted upon the consideration of the reforms which 
 legislation and the representative system would have to 
 undergo, when there should be no longer a king. The agita- 
 tors of the army declaimed against the first, on the faith of 
 visions, which showed them all things regulated for the reign 
 of Christ; and against both rose, full of fierce hatred, a party, 
 which was driven by the instinct of poverty towards the last 
 term of all revolutions, equality in position and in fortune, the 
 abolition of ranks and the community of property. These 
 levellers were mostly in the ranks of the army, and among the 
 populace; they, too, had their writers and their doctrinal leaders, 
 men as ignorant as themselves of a question still misunder- 
 stood, and unworthy of being even listened to at that period. 
 
 The disputes among the agitators, the saints, the levellers, 
 and the politicians, would have excited a war in the bosom of 
 the army, scarcely yet victorious over the presbyterians and 
 the royalists, had it not been for the energy and ability of 
 Cromwell. He first exercised severity at the fitting moment, 
 and then conciliated the troops; and his order as general 
 became law with all who served under his standard. He 
 himself and some of the independent chiefs knew that the 
 king would reject the four bills; for this unfortunate prince, 
 victim of his own intrigues, was no longer merely their pri- 
 soner, but their instrument also. Acting upon false advice, 
 he persisted in a system of obstinacy to which the queen, who 
 shared not his perils, and several of the less able of his sincere 
 partisans, counselled him to adhere, as the only course com- 
 
 d2 
 
36 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 patible with his dignity. Upon his reply in the negative, 
 which had been perfectly foreseen, the parliament at once 
 declared that it would not again treat with him. 
 
 Great was the joy in the army and among the political 
 independents and the levellers. But, without the king, what 
 was to become of the old order of things? This was the 
 question asked on all sides, by those w r ho had wished to 
 reform and not to destroy it. They had no need to concert 
 with one another; their fears were of that nature which bring 
 prompt counsel. A formidable reaction broke out against 
 the independents. Behind the presbyterian majority, w^hich 
 still in the parliament, in the army, and in the magistracy, 
 occupied important posts, were ranged all those whom the 
 revolution had already outstripped. The Scotch also seized 
 this occasion to declare how they had understood the revolu- 
 tion; and whilst, for the third time, they passed the frontier 
 in arms, the western and northern counties most distant from 
 London, rose in revolt; the eastern counties followed the 
 example, and the movement extended itself to the gates of 
 London. Cromwell and his principal lieutenants were de- 
 clared public enemies; they were not men to defend them- 
 selves by words, or to dispute for London and the parliament 
 with their adversaries, whilst the kingdom escaped their 
 grasp. The instinct of self-preservation taught them better. 
 The committee of government still belonged to them; starting 
 from this centre, they threw themselves in every direction 
 upon the insurgents, and disarmed them. Discipline every- 
 where gained the day over mere passion. Cromwell, with 
 an unexampled rapidity, advanced towards the north against 
 the Scotch, fought with them three great battles, in which he 
 staked all for all, as suited his situation and his genius, and 
 did not leave ten of his enemies under arms. The news 
 which reached him from London was of a nature to hasten 
 his return ; but j udging that he should in reality gain time 
 by making his triumph complete, he entered Scotland, quar- 
 tered his troops there, and occupied himself with every minute 
 detail that could secure the tranquillity of the country. 
 
 Meantime, the presbyterians having recovered the majority 
 in the lower chamber, and the upper chamber, nearly deserted 
 since the self-denying ordinance, having witnessed the reap- 
 pearance of the presbyterian lords, negotiations had recoin- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 37 
 
 menced with the king. The greatest efforts had been made 
 to reconcile him with the nation; but more advantageous con- 
 ditions, far from prevailing with him, only rendering him 
 more exacting, the independents, witnesses of these vain 
 efforts, although a minority in the parliament, had not lost 
 courage; the victorious troops would ere long return to their 
 aid, and peace with the king would soon become impossible. 
 The presbyterians saw the approach of this moment with 
 despair. The parties who feared it made every effort to pre- 
 vent it, and those who desired it, to hasten it. For some 
 months the kingdom was a prey to perfectly unexampled con- 
 fusion: wherever men ceased to combat, they resumed dis- 
 cussion and dispute; each sect, each subdivision of a party, 
 thought itself called upon to save the republic. Petitions and 
 remonstrances came in crowds to the parliament; some to 
 counsel, others to accuse. 
 
 VIII. The republicans alone at once acted and disputed; 
 those of the towns wrote against the intolerance and avarice of 
 the presbyterian clergy, against the superstition which made 
 crimes of heresy and superstition of things beyond the com- 
 prehension of man. They demanded that the king should be 
 made responsible for the blood which had been shed by his 
 orders. They availed themselves, against the administration, of 
 the sufferings of commerce, and at the same time assailed the 
 levellers, a party odious to all who possessed any property. The 
 republicans of the army applied themselves to hunting down 
 the king; they demanded that the laws against the delinquents 
 should attach to him. Strafford and Laud, they said, had only 
 acted by his orders. The parliament made no reply; the regi- 
 ments returning to London, victorious at every step, 
 explained themselves more clearly; they positively in- 16i8 
 sisted that the king should be brought to trial, and that 1 [ i ° 49 
 his sons should be cited to appear and make their sub- 
 mission to the parliament, under penalty of being themselves 
 deprived of their rights. The parliament still remained silent; 
 then came menacing injunctions. The councils of officers 
 wrote, that they appealed to the sword of God against the 
 treason of the parliament; and, soon afterwards, entering 
 London, they proceeded to expurgate it. One hundred and 
 forty-three members, thus excluded in a few days from the 
 lower chamber, left the field open to the independents. 
 
38 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 Cromwell, leisurely returning from Scotland, had followed 
 these acts of violence at a distance; judging them necessary, 
 he had thought it well to allow them to seem referable merely to 
 the excitement of party. He reappeared in the house of com- 
 mons, as a supreme moderator, adopted with hesitation that 
 which had been done in his absence, but, the work once begun, 
 declared that it must be maintained. The trial of Charles I. had 
 already been resolved upon by him and the chiefs of his party; a 
 correspondence intercepted by them had shown them their con- 
 demnation written by the king's own hand, had the chance of 
 arms or a delusive peace placed them at his discretion. They 
 resolved to treat him as he would have treated them. To this, 
 unfortunately, the question between Charles I. and the inde- 
 pendents, his last adversaries, was necessarily, sooner or later, 
 to be reduced. The absolute government, by violating all 
 public liberties, had deprived itself of the right of one day 
 invoking the constitutional principle of royal inviolability, 
 and those who had commenced resistance, who had afterwards 
 shown themselves incapable of rendering it victorious, by 
 transmitting to others the difficulties and weight of the enter- 
 prise, had placed these under the necessity of seeking their 
 safety in the overthrow of royalty, and the death of him who, 
 living, might destroy them. Cromwell was one of those who, 
 in condemning Charles I. obeyed this law of self-preservation; 
 others were led away by religious fanaticism: others, again, 
 yielding to a sentiment of republican exaltation, were pleased 
 to treat a king like any other man, and to measure them- 
 selves, so to speak, by his degradation. But, as was afterwards 
 proved, not one of these judges, after having sent the king 
 to the scaffold, was less at ease in his conscience, than Charles 
 himself would have been in employing a different fortune 
 against them. The odious feature was the affectation of the 
 forms of justice; yet in party struggles, this is often the 
 necessary lie of the strong against the weak. 
 
 The death of Charles I. had been demanded by the inde- 
 pendents of the army, of London, and of two counties; by the 
 levellers, by the millenarians, sectaries even more insane than 
 the religious independents, and who never existed as a party. 
 A dozen lords, the only peers who retained their seats at that 
 time, protested against it, and from that moment there was 
 no longer an upper house. The cavaliers, the churchmen, the 
 
INTRODUCTION. 39 
 
 presbyterians, who had sought refuge abroad, gave utterance 
 to a powerless horror, not participated in by the governments 
 of Europe. The people of London, witnesses of the brutali- 
 ties which were mixed up with the iniquity of the judicial pro- 
 ceedings, took a warm interest in the illustrious accused. The 
 mass of the nation manifested merely profound astonishment; 
 it was nothing more than a passive accomplice. Afterwards, 
 indignation appeared to have been repressed; but other 
 events had rendered it a conventional sentiment. 
 
 Scotland alone openly evinced her grief ; her political views 
 had never been separated from her religious convictions; she 
 had always believed in the good faith of the king; she de- 
 tested the independents as much as she detested the episco- 
 palians; she arose, and calling in the eldest son of Charles I., 
 proclaimed him king, under the title of Charles II., while 
 England submitted to a new government, residing in a parlia- 
 ment without a house of lords, and without a king. 
 
 The insurrection of Scotland added greatly to the work 
 which the new republic had to do, ere it could exist without 
 dispute. Ireland, ever since the insurrection of 1641, had 
 not been reduced to submission; she had been neglected, and 
 the king's party was established there. In the English 
 colonies of America, the troops and the various governors were 
 still for the king. The dethroned family possessed a fleet 
 which found an asylum in the ports of Holland and Portugal, 
 and brought succours to the insurgent countries. Even in 
 the heart of the army, the republic had in the levelling party 
 a formidable enemy, fully disposed to regard it as another 
 usurpation, unless it established the community of property 
 and the equality of rank. The republic everywhere opposed 
 Cromwell to its enemies; first, to the levellers, five thousand 
 of whom he dispersed, and whom he compelled to discontinue 
 their meetings; he then went to Ireland, and in one cam- 
 paign compelled most of the royalist towns to open their 
 gates to him, and made himself master of three-fourths of 
 the island. When his presence in this country was no longer 
 absolutely necessary, he marched against the Scotch and 
 Charles II. 
 
 The young king had only received the crown on taking an 
 oath to observe the Scotch covenant, and his loose conduct 
 had already exposed him to representations and unqualified 
 
40 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 censures on the part of presbyterian ministers; however, at 
 the approach of Cromwell, he could not doubt the affection 
 of the Scotch. Although he surrounded himself with the 
 courtiers who had followed his fortunes upon the continent, 
 his whole strength lay in the devotion of the same presby- 
 terian troops who had conquered the king, his father; their 
 discipline almost equalled that of the English. They were 
 commanded by excellent officers, and against them, conse- 
 quently, the superiority of Cromwell's military genius ap- 
 peared in all its splendour. We know with what daring he 
 placed himself in the rear of an army, which, furnished with 
 every necessary whilst he wanted provisions, having for it 
 the inhabitants while all were hostile to him, might by turning 
 round have prevented him from ever again seeing England. 
 Charles II. feared to inclose such an enemy, and from a want 
 of resolution, which historians have praised as an act of bold- 
 ness, seeing England open, he rushed thither; but all was 
 prepared to receive him, and Cromwell was close upon him. 
 The young king found himself at Worcester in the situation 
 to which a few days before he might have reduced his ene- 
 mies, and fled almost alone, after a battle in which his courage 
 had been but indifferently manifested. At the same time the 
 republican fleet dispersed the king's ships, cleared the Channel 
 Islands from the pirates which infested them, carried the re- 
 volution to the most distant colonies, and demanded satisfac- 
 tion of Holland for former insults and injuries, which the 
 weakness of the two last reigns had left unpunished. This 
 war was being prosecuted with unhoped-for success against 
 the greatest seamen of that time, when the last victories of 
 Cromwell enabled the parliament to unite England and 
 Scotland in one republic. Never had England displayed such 
 great resources as under the administration of the handful 
 of obscure citizens who might be regarded as having 
 1 ^ 49 usurped the state. She paid considerable taxes; sup- 
 1653. ported an army of sixty thousand men, and main- 
 tained a powerful fleet. She had seen her fields de- 
 vastated, her towns ruined, her population devoured by civil 
 war; but since the commencement of this war, she no longer 
 had to supply the profusions of the court, nor the immense 
 revenues of the bishops, nor the pensions of the courtiers, 
 nor the venality of the judges, nor the insolence of lacqueys 
 
INTRODUCTION. 41 
 
 of every class. The severe morals of the presbyterians, fol- 
 lowed by those still more rigid of the independents, had 
 superseded those of the monarchical society. Frivolous enter- 
 tainments, feastings, theatres, bull fights, cock fighting, even 
 popular rejoicings, had disappeared. The domains of the 
 crown, the lands of the bishops and chapters, the estates of 
 the nobles, had reverted to the nation, and no individual was 
 the richer for them. The citizens had introduced into the 
 government their habits of order and economy, their probity 
 and their industry. Since the commencement of the war, 
 the devouring plague of idleness had no longer exercised its 
 ravages; every one was employed, either in administering 
 public affairs, or in fighting, or in fabricating arms and cul- 
 tivating the earth for those who fought. Not only were all 
 the evils of war and fanaticism repaired, but all the indica- 
 tions of a great increase of prosperity manifested them- 
 selves. 
 
 Such were already the results of the revolution. 
 The parliament possessed sufficient intelligence and 1649 
 perseverance to be able to follow it out through all the 165 3 
 abuses and vices still presented by the social state. They 
 might have reorganized the judicial and ci vil administration 
 upon a simple basis, and they had it under consideration to 
 deliver the people from the monstrous complication of laws, 
 which the levellers energetically denounced as the livery of 
 Norman slavery. But if there was one want more generally 
 felt than another, it was that of enjoying in peace the reforms 
 obtained at the price of so many sacrifices. The courageous 
 ambition of working for future generations, only carried 
 beyond the original views of the revolution those who had 
 already advanced beyond those views. Men feared lest new 
 discussions should result in the triumph of alarming doc- 
 trines, such as those of the levellers and of the philosophers, 
 who already made a profession of deism. Thus, the want of 
 national sympathy with the ideas and the creed of the long 
 parliament, left that assembly alone in presence of the army, 
 when that question, fatal to all revolutions, the question of 
 disbanding the army, now become useless, presented itself. 
 
 The councils of officers, and the clubs of agitators still 
 existed; they had not forgotten that the parliament owed its 
 existence to them; that its right was founded upon their 
 
42 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 swords. That they should make up their minds to return from 
 the ambitious life of the camp to the obscure toil of the city, 
 there was needed more than the love of the public welfare, 
 a disinterestedness which is not to be found in the great 
 masses of mankind. Seeing themselves threatened with the 
 loss at once of the habits of power, and of the easy existence 
 afforded them by abundant and regular pay, they demanded 
 the dissolution of the long parliament, accusing it of a desire 
 tyrannically to perpetuate itself in the exercise of power. The 
 parliament treated the army as factious, and left it for some 
 time without pay. Cromwell, whose interests were those of 
 the soldiers, and whose opinions, at a time when in general 
 no one was decided whether it was better to stop, to retro- 
 grade, or to proceed, were probably not those of the leaders 
 of the parliament, took a step which his ambition had long 
 meditated. He expelled the independents, as they had ex- 
 pelled the presbyterians, and seized upon power. His will, 
 powerful as it was, would have failed against the resistance 
 of the soldiers, had he undertaken to disband them. 
 
 It was fortunate for England that such a man should take 
 upon himself the responsibility of an inevitable violence, 
 because with him order was the result of usurpation instead 
 of anarchy, and order was the all-necessary thing. In every 
 place and in every age it is the popular necessities which 
 have created the conventions called principles, and prin- 
 ciples have ever been mute before necessities. In the pre- 
 sent case, the necessities were security, repose, and a gran- 
 deur which should awe the external enemies of the revolution, 
 and the commercial interests opposed to those of England 
 
 An administration was required, which should com- 
 1653 prehend all parties and belong to none; which should 
 1658. ^e * n possession of all the ideas of the time and profess 
 
 none exclusively; which should make use of the army 
 and not place itself in its train. Cromwell effected all this. 
 He did not possess the affection of the English, but he had 
 their confidence. The working classes did not protest against 
 his despotism, because it was as much to their interest as to 
 his that parties should cease to dispute, since they could not 
 come to an understanding; because the material results of the 
 revolution were in action. Under Charles I., men had re- 
 quired every tax to be voted by their representatives, because 
 
INTRODUCTION. 43 
 
 they were weary of supporting the bishops, the chapters, the 
 nobles, and the court intriguers; but the administration of 
 Cromwell was honest, economical, judicious, and permitted 
 no sinecures. Men before had revolted against the religious 
 tyranny of the bishops and the renewed pretensions of the 
 papists. Under Cromwell, every one freely professed his own 
 belief; papists alone were not tolerated, although even they 
 in Ireland enjoyed more liberty than before. Lastly, at the 
 commencement of the revolution, men had preferred ceasing 
 to work and to fight, to the awaiting the ruin of external 
 commerce and of manufacturing industry; Cromwell gave 
 law to the foreigners in the ports of England as in their 
 own markets. Even the existence of a numerous 
 army was found not without its uses in this system; for 1653 
 the high opinion entertained of it compelled foreign 165 g 
 governments to greater respect than the haughty 
 temper of Cromwell could have obtained alone. England, 
 rich, powerful, active, more respected than she had ever 
 been under her kings, owed this to the ability with which 
 Cromwell administered the means and the resources created 
 by the revolution. Cromwell had to combat only the 
 heads of the various parties, whom he successively deceived 
 or defeated. He was right as against the royalists, because 
 they were the enemies of the country; as against the presby- 
 terians, because they were intolerant, and did not compre- 
 hend the revolution; as against the levellers, because they 
 demanded impossibilities; finally, against the extreme repub- 
 licans, because they did not represent the general opinion. 
 But he was wrong as against a class of enlightened patriots 
 who clung to the republic, not from mere fanaticism but 
 from reason, and who wished that the results of the revolu- 
 tion should be secured by institutions capable of surviving 
 the man whose capacity and intentions might at first be 
 sufficient. Amongst these he had indefatigable enemies; some, 
 his old colleagues in parliament; others, his lieutenants on 
 the field of battle; others, his accomplices in the death of 
 Charles I. All had admired him, and all hated him the 
 more they had admired him. At each new attempt of theirs 
 which he had to repel, he resumed somewhat more of the old 
 régime, and this paved the way to the counter-revolution. 
 He did not commit the unpardonable offence of re-establishing 
 
44 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 the hereditary privilege of state functions, and he con- 
 stantly refused royalty. It is imagined by some that the 
 term of his life marked that of his resources, and that he 
 would have retained with difficulty a power at once so envied 
 and so detested. Yet the events which took place at his 
 death proved the equal weakness of all parties, and the pro- 
 found indecision of the nation. 
 
 
 
 _ 
 
 
PART THE FIRST. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE RESTORATION. 
 
 State of England at the death of Cromwell — Richard Cromwell endeavours 
 to destroy the influence of the army, and to exalt the parliament — The 
 army overthrows ^ the parliament and Richard — It restores and again 
 expels the Rump parliament — Divisions in the army — The Scotch army 
 sides with the parliament, that of England abandons its generals — The 
 royalists league with the presbyterians and the Scotch army ; they ob- 
 tain the convocation of a parliament, according to the ancient constitu- 
 tion — This parliament recals the Stuarts — Last efforts of the repub- 
 licans — Alliance of the royalists, the Anglican churchmen and the pres- 
 byterians against the republicans — Circumstances of the restoration — 
 Trial of the regicides — Restitution of the property of the crown, of the 
 bishops, and the lords — Re- establishment of episcopacy — First attacks 
 on the presbyterians. 
 
 At the death of Cromwell, England was divided into eleven 
 military governments, under the command of major-generals, 
 whose authority, at first almost absolute, had since been a 
 little restricted, as becoming tyrannical. Scotland was tranquil 
 under the administration of general Monk. The presby- 
 terians freely exercised their worship, and persecution was 
 forbidden them. Ireland, under Henry, Cromwell's second 
 son, repaired, with her astonishing power of resources, the 
 losses which a long war and a rigorous system of pacification 
 had occasioned her. The three nations were represented by 
 one parliament, composed of two chambers, the one the 
 deputies of the commons, the other the parvenus of the 
 revolution, nominated for life by Cromwell. This parliament 
 
46 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1658- 
 
 had just been dissolved for indocility; and several conspiracies, 
 royalist and republican, had been punished with death. 
 
 Nothing had yet been able to shake this violent order of 
 things. Yet the counter-revolution had commenced: in the 
 government, by the re-establishment of a power similar to 
 that of Elizabeth, with the exception of titles and etiquette, 
 and by the creation of a superior chamber on the model of 
 that of the lords; in the nation, by the terror with which the 
 doctrines of the philosophers and levellers inspired the rich and 
 active mass, a terror which saw no security but in an order of 
 things far behind that which had permitted the attacks upon 
 the inequality of situations and fortunes. This disposition 
 rapidly increased during the crisis which followed the death of 
 Cromwell. As soon as the iron hand of the despot had ceased 
 to keep in check the remains of the old parties, they all re- 
 appeared, not instructed by experience, or disposed to a 
 reconciliation which was desirable, but animated one against 
 the other by an hatred which the insults they had suffered in 
 common under Cromwell seemed to have rendered more vio- 
 lent. All had not only their political views but their personal 
 vanities and ambition to gratify. Next to the levellers and the 
 religious republicans, the philosophical republicans were the 
 least in favour. Cromwell, in humiliating them, had thrown 
 disrepute even upon their principles; he had proved their 
 virtues to be inefficacious. The presbyterians were the most 
 numerous, but their position was one of great difficulty, since 
 it was dangerous for them to abandon that which the inde- 
 pendents had done in spite of them, and no less dangerous to 
 endeavour to modify the work according to their own ideas. 
 
 Cromwell alone would have been able to preserve from 
 dissolution this incoherent assemblage of interests, passions, 
 and results, for which the revolution was now only a half 
 effaced symbol. His son Richard, chosen to succeed to such 
 an heritage, felt that he must restore it to the nation, that it 
 might take an interest in defending it. He convoked a par- 
 liament, composed of two chambers, according to the principle 
 established by Cromwell. In this assembly formidable divi- 
 sions arose. The presbyterian or moderate majority allowed 
 themselves to be associated with power, but not without trem- 
 bling at the species of obligation which it imposed upon them. 
 Even whilst acknowledging Richard as protector, they showed 
 
1660.] CONSTITUTION OF THE RUMP PARLIAMENT. 47 
 
 that they had not entirely adopted the order of things which 
 then existed: it was still the reign of the army, the constitu- 
 tion given by an usurping general, and not consented to by 
 the people. Thus the lower chamber rejected the idea of the 
 other chamber, as they called it, because it represented only 
 the army. 
 
 It, however, at the same time, represented the only party 
 which could not enter into a compromise with the old régime, 
 and this was the great interest round which all should have 
 rallied. But the army itself, after having lost sight of it 
 for seven years, returned to it, half corrupted by the servile 
 obedience which the protector had exacted from it. Dis- 
 cipline had preserved the morals of the soldiers, but the devo- 
 tion to one man had destroyed their belief. From being 
 ardent sectaries, they had become declamatory hypocrites. 
 However, when they saw Richard Cromwell about to replace 
 the republic in the hands of persons who were objects of 
 suspicion to them, they rose, as they had formerly done, 
 against the presbyterian majority of the long parliament. 
 The councils of officers reconstituted themselves, and seized 
 upon authority. At the head of this movement were generals 
 Fleetwood and Desborough, one son-in-law, the other brother- 
 in-law of Cromwell, and Lambert, who had long been one 
 of his most devoted lieutenants, but who had latterly incurred 
 his disfavour. These three men aspired to nothing less than 
 to replace Cromwell; but at that moment, neither of them 
 being strong enough to dominate the others, they united to 
 place the power in the hands of men whom they could direct, 
 and whose cause, as opposed to the presbyterians and royal- 
 ists, was their own. Forty-two members of the republican 
 parliament, which Cromwell had so roughly deposed in 1653, 
 still existed; they recalled them.- 
 
 The conduct of this parliament was very remarkable. 
 The majority of those who composed it were energetic men, 
 able, and full of conviction. Recalled by necessities which 
 they thoroughly appreciated, they took up the revolution 
 at the point at which Cromwell had stopped it, and conceived 
 the magnanimous hope of making it triumph, when it was 
 betrayed on every side. Their short administration was but 
 a too unequal contest against the disdain of a short-sighted 
 public, which nicknamed their assembly the Hump Par lia- 
 
48 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1658- 
 
 ment, or Fag-end Parliament, and against the opposition of 
 the presbyterians, the plots of the royalists, and the cabals of 
 the officers of the army. They perhaps gave too much cause 
 for distrust in refusing any kind of accommodation with the 
 presbyterians; but by the wise measures which they took to 
 destroy the influence of the officers, they placed the latter in 
 sufficient peril to drive them to a new act of violence, and 
 found themselves, accordingly, once more driven from the 
 house. 
 
 The old party of the Stuarts had greatly profited by the 
 troubles which had followed the death of Cromwell; and pur- 
 suing those tactics which in civil discords all parties think 
 themselves authorized in adopting, they secretly excited the 
 agitators, spread the most absurd reports, terrified- some and 
 seduced others, spoke of reconciliation, of forgetting the past, 
 and actively corresponded with the sons of Charles I.5 who 
 had taken refuge at Brussels. Ashley Cooper, a man of 
 profound immorality, and with a suppleness of mind which 
 passed for superiority, was the soul of all these intrigues. 
 During the revolution he had had the address to keep always 
 on the side of the victorious party, and to preserve immense 
 credit with the nation. Having publicly counselled Crom- 
 well to make himself king, he now pretended that he had 
 only given him this advice in order to destroy him, and that 
 he had only served, him in order to be in a position to betray 
 him. As he was in thorough possession of all secrets, and a 
 master of all affairs, the princes thought that his mediation 
 could not be too dearly purchased, and by his care their 
 return was urgently hastened on. When the chiefs of the 
 presbyterian party had made vain efforts to come to an 
 understanding with the republicans of the Rump Parlia- 
 ment, Ashley Cooper, and others who intrigued with him, 
 boldly made overtures to them on the part of the princes. 
 They at the same time made overtures to general Monk, for- 
 merly a royalist, and who since the death of Cromwell had 
 been on indifferent terms with Fleetwood, Lambert, and 
 Desborough. Monk had thorough command over his army, 
 and was posted in a country whose disposition in favour ot 
 Charles II. had undergone no change, despite the memory ot 
 Dunbar and Worcester. The result of a lengthened nego- 
 tiation was the formation of a royalist and presbyterian league 
 
1660.] DEFEAT OF THE INDEPENDENTS. 49 
 
 against the independents and the army. It was arranged 
 that Monk should march upon London with his troops, and 
 that, in the first instance, the intention announced should be 
 that of re-establishing the Rump parliament, over which 
 Lambert and his friends had usurped the authority. The 
 soldiers whom these generals might have otherwise opposed 
 to Monk, if the true project had been revealed, were deceived 
 by this manœuvre, and preferred abandoning their chiefs and 
 submitting to the parliament, to drawing the sword against 
 their old companions in arms. Those under the command of 
 Lambert even marched against him, and delivered him to 
 the Rump parliament, which was thus re-established without 
 a struggle. From this moment, Monk was the real general- 
 issimo of the army. He concealed his projects for yet some 
 time, until he had secured the important posts in London, 
 placed his own men, and distributed those of the other 
 generals in such a manner that, when they found out the 
 deception practised on them, they should not be able either 
 to rally or oppose any great resistance. Then, as if by a 
 concerted signal, there were sent from London and the 
 various counties, addresses to Monk, in which he was called 
 upon, as the man to whom everything was possible, to re- 
 instate in parliament the presbyterian members who had 
 been expelled by the independents in 1648, 
 
 The members of the Rump parliament had not waited for 
 the presentation of these addresses to manifest their distrust 
 of Monk. They had subjected his pretended republicanism 
 to several tests, which saved them the shame of being taken 
 for dupes; but they thought they were bound to remain firm 
 at their post so long as it was tenable. Their opposition to 
 the measure solicited by the presbyterian petitioners was 
 vain. By order of general Monk, soldiers brought back to 
 parliament those same représentants whom soldiers had driven 
 from it in 1648. The independents, finding themselves a 
 powerless, feeble minority in the presence of their adversaries, 
 withdrew. The presbyterians, in the name of the nation, 
 immediately abolished the oath of fidelity to the government 
 without a king, and without a house of lords, proclaimed the 
 dissolution of the Rump Parliament, and convoked another, 
 composed of two chambers, according to the old constitution. 
 
 These events succeeded each other with such rapidity that 
 
 E 
 
50 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1658- 
 
 the army, dispersed, and in open rupture with its best 
 generals, could offer no opposition to any of them. It was 
 evidently astonished, but not subdued. Monk displayed 
 much vigour and ability in endeavouring to prevent it from 
 disturbing the elections for the new parliament. He awed it 
 by menaces, and especially by the assurance given to the 
 officers of every regiment, that it was not intended to restore 
 the Stuarts, but only to give back to the nation its parlia- 
 mentary privileges. Still, he had to repress several move- 
 ments. The opening of the parliament was approaching, 
 when Lambert escaped, collected a few troops, and raised the 
 republican standard. The effect which the escape of this 
 man, so renowned for his daring and his activity, produced 
 among the soldiers, the independents, the millenarians, and 
 the levellers, showed how little was needed to excite a civil 
 war. As the citizens feared nothing so much as this, they 
 shook off the apathetic indifference to which the protectorate 
 had habituated them, animated themselves against the soldiers 
 and the independents with a hatred equal to that which they 
 had formerly manifested against the delinquents. From every 
 side was urged the great change which could alone secure 
 the repose and welfare of the country. If the working classes 
 had duly considered the causes of this prosperity, which they 
 feared to compromise by maintaining the revolution, they 
 would never have consented to the restoration of an order of 
 things which was to bring back among them a population of 
 ruined, idle, and grasping courtiers, and to convert devotion 
 to a particular family into a career of fortune for all the 
 intriguers who surrounded it; but they thought only of what 
 they had to fear from the army and from the poverty of the 
 populace. The parliament met under the influence of the same 
 terrors. The upper chamber, which had not been destroyed, 
 but only suspended, reappeared, numerous and thoroughly 
 cured of that love of liberty which had rendered it favourable 
 to the first impulses of the revolution. It demanded the 
 restoration of monarchy. The lower chamber, on its side, 
 considered that it had to decide between the party vengeance 
 which might result from a new civil war, and the restoration 
 which was represented by its agents as clement, unexacting, 
 prudent, and determined upon adapting itself to the manners 
 and wants of the time. The famous declaration of Breda 
 
1660.] THE DECLARATION OF BREDA. 51 
 
 was presented to it by order of Monk, and removed all 
 remaining hesitation: 
 
 " Charles, by the grace of God, king of England, Scotland, 
 France, and Ireland; To all our loving subjects, of what 
 degree or quality soever, greeting. If the general confusion 
 and distraction which is spread over the whole kingdom, doth 
 not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds 
 which have for so many years together been kept bleeding, may 
 be bound up, all we can say will be to no purpose. However, 
 after this long silence, we have thought it our duty to declare 
 how much we desire to contribute thereunto; and that, as 
 we can never give over the hope in good time to obtain the 
 possession of that right which God and nature have made 
 our due, so we do make it our daily suit to the Divine provi- 
 dence, that he will, in compassion to us and our subjects, 
 after so long misery and sufferings, remit and put us into a 
 quiet and peaceable possession of that our right, with as little 
 blood and damage to our people as is possible. Nor do we 
 more desire to enjoy what is ours, than that all our subjects 
 may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire adminis- 
 tration of justice, 
 
 " And to the end that the fear of punishment may not 
 engage any, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a 
 perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet 
 and happiness of their country, in the restoration of king, 
 peers, and people to their just, ancient, and fundamental 
 rights, we do by these presents declare that we do grant a 
 free and general pardon, which we are ready, upon demand, 
 to pass under our great seal of England, to all our subjects, 
 of what degree or quality soever, who," within forty days 
 after the publishing hereof, shall lay hold upon this our 
 grace and favour, and shall by any public act declare their 
 doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience 
 of good subjects, excepting only such persons as shall be 
 hereafter excepted by parliament. Those only excepted, 
 let all our subjects, how faulty soever, rely upon the word 
 of a king, solemnly given by this present declaration, 
 that no crime whatsoever, committed against us or our 
 royal father, before the publication of this, shall ever rise 
 in judgment, or be brought in question against any of them, 
 to the least endamagement of them, either in their lives, 
 
 e2 
 
«52 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660. 
 
 liberties, or estates, or, as far forth as lies in our power, so 
 much as to the prejudice of their reputations, by any reproach 
 or term of distinction from our best subjects; we, desiring 
 and ordaining that henceforward all notes of discord, separa- 
 tion, and difference of parties, be utterly abolished among all 
 our subjects; whom we invite and conjure to a perfect union 
 among themselves, under our protection, for the resettlement 
 of our just rights and theirs in a free parliament, by which, 
 upon the word of a king, we will be advised, usw I 
 
 "And because thé passion and uncharitableness of the 
 times have produced several opinions in religions, by which, 
 men are engaged in animosities and parties against each 
 other, which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of 
 conversation, will be composed or better understood, we do 
 declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man 
 shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of 
 opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace 
 of the kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to 
 such act of parliament, as upon mature deliberation shall! be 
 offered to us, for thé full granting that indulgence. 
 
 " And because, in the continual distractions of so many 
 years, and so many and great revolutions, many grants and 
 purchases of estates have been made to and by many officers, 
 soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of the same, and 
 who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles, we 
 are likewise willing that all such differences, and all things 
 relating to such grants, sales, and purchases, shall be deter- 
 mined in parliament, which can best provide for the just 
 satisfaction of all men who are concerned. ic/lJ 
 
 " And we do further declare, that we will be ready to con- 
 sent to any act or acts of parliament to the purposes afore- 
 said, and for the full satisfaction of all arrears due to the 
 officers and soldiers of the army under the command of 
 general Monk, and that they shall be received into our 
 service upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy. 
 Given under our sign manual and privy seal at our court of 
 Breda, this T \ day of April, 1660, in the 12th year of our 
 reign." 
 
 On the reading of this document, the restoration of royalty 
 in the family of the Stuarts was voted by acclamation; and 
 it was alleged, that the intentions announced by the déclara- 
 
1660.] THE RESTORATION. 53 
 
 tion not only comprehended the motives, but the conditions 
 also of the recal. It was in vain that several presbyterians 
 represented, that what had been demanded from Charles I. 
 before his rupture with the parliament, ought to be obtained 
 from his son; that the disputes would soon be renewed, if the 
 amount of authority proper to be given to the latter were not 
 fixed beforehand; and that it would be shameful for so much 
 blood to have been spilled to no purpose. They were answered, 
 that there was no time to be lost ; that the revolutionists 
 might, in some new trouble, resume their advantages, and 
 that they must rely upon the wisdom and integrity of the 
 monarch. The majority were satisfied with these reasons: 
 blind, if they really thought that this manifestation of an 
 unlimited confidence would have the same result for the 
 nation as the reserve dictated by prudence; inexcusable, if, 
 as it would seem, fear alone decided this appeal to the feelings 
 of one whom prejudice, self-interest, and resentment neces- 
 sarily precluded from acknowledging his father to be in fault. 
 If the resolution to recal the Stuarts had been taken with 
 less precipitation, and the conditions of their re- establishment 
 had been regulated by those presbyterians and church-of- 
 England royalists, who might be considered as the true friends 
 of the country, a settlement similar to that which took place 
 twenty-eight years later would have removed far off all cause 
 for a fresh revolution; but the declaration of Breda was an 
 act of amnesty for the nation, instead of an acknowledgment 
 of those rights which it had acquired at the price of so much 
 blood; and such was the constitution of men's minds now, 
 that they thought themselves fortunate in obtaining this par- 
 don for their victories. All the acts which had been passed 
 in disparagement of royalty were torn out of the journals of 
 parliament, and the commons hastened to vote sums of money 
 to be offered to the king, and to the dukes of York and Glou- 
 cester, his brothers. They went still further even than 
 these, by proscribing all who had taken part in the death of 
 Charles I., as if, in the heart of that king's sons, his execution 
 were not regarded as the crime of the entire nation. It was, 
 therefore, at a later period, a mere absurdity for men to in- 
 voke, at every act of fresh vengeance on the part of the Stuarts, 
 the declaration of Breda, or to reproach Charles II. with it, 
 as with a deception, because they themselves had been mis- 
 
54 
 
 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 [1660. 
 
 taken enough to regard it as anything other than what it really 
 was. The declaration of Breda was no deception, for Charles 
 II. proclaimed therein his good pleasure to be the basis of his 
 sovereign authority. This principle, once admitted, could not be 
 effectually established, but by the successive abrogation of all 
 the concessions which royalty had been obliged to make since 
 the reign of Elizabeth, and by the gradual extinction of the 
 knowledge created by those political and religious discussions, 
 which had given being to the revolution, and which great men 
 of every class, orators, historians, poets, and savans, the glory 
 of England, had spread abroad. This act, so readily accepted 
 as a treaty of peace, was, in reality, the declaration of a new 
 war, of a war which demanded on the part of the Stuarts far 
 greater efforts than had been made by the nation to overthrow 
 them, in the first instance. 
 
 In addressing his manifesto of Breda to the nation, Charles 
 II. was, no doubt, himself unconscious of the infinite injus- 
 tice and violence to which this principle of , absolute sove- 
 reignty, admitted by the parliament with such strange want 
 of caution, would lead him. This revolution, which his pre- 
 judices would not allow him to appreciate, he considered to 
 be the work of a handful of factious men, and he was, there* 
 fore, scarcely capable of those deep designs, those systematic 
 views, which might at first be conjectured from so conciliatory 
 an address, so soon followed by tyrannical measures, and his 
 successive rupture with each of the parties whose alliance he 
 had sought. He had, in reality, but one idea, that of creating, 
 somehow or other, a despotism sufficiently powerful to pre- 
 clude its being at all questioned. There may have been this 
 exception; although he made open profession of irreligion, he 
 acknowledged that Roman Catholicism was an excellent 
 auxiliary to absolute power, and he felt how advantageous it 
 would be for him, could he substitute it for that Anglican 
 protestantism which, from matters of religion, had extended 
 the right of discussion and examination to political affairs. 
 This was, probably, the whole amount of his secret policy, a 
 policy readily divined by those men who composed the parlia- 
 ment, and who had already combated the precisely similar 
 projects of Charles I. 
 
 But no distrust was manifested, and if Charles II. committed 
 the capital error of bringing again into discussion, by his de- 
 
1660.] THE RESTORATION. 55 
 
 claration of Breda, a question which force had decided, and 
 which force alone could decide again, the reception given him 
 by England was not of a nature to enlighten him as to this 
 error. The whole of his journey to London was one fête, one 
 continued shout of rejoicing. He was young, and not ill- 
 looking; he was full of frank delight at his unhoped-for return, 
 and those who met him on his way, according to their rank 
 or the class to which they belonged, and, more especially, 
 according to the degree of republicanism for which they 
 had to obtain pardon, thought they could not manifest too 
 much enthusiasm, express too warmly their transports. The 
 welcome given to the cavaliers who had accompanied the 
 king in exile, and who now shared his triumph, was scarcely 
 less cordial. The reconciliation between two factions, which 
 so fiercely had fought each other, took place with wonderful 
 facility. In these first days of union, no protest against 
 the re -establishment of monarchy arose from among those 
 who, more or less, had contributed to its overthrow; no re- 
 sentment was as yet manifested by exiles, who could hardly 
 believe their triumph. On both sides, the language of false- 
 hood dulled the edge of threatening asperities, and for awhile 
 adjusted the conduct and modified the passions of men to the 
 imperious exigencies of existing circumstances. The resig- 
 nation of the army was wholly silent; the joy of the citizens 
 and populace was manifested by an ardent reaction against 
 republican principles, and the austerity of revolutionary man- 
 ners. " A spirit of extravagance," says an historian of that 
 period, " and an immoderate joy, had seized upon the nation 
 and banished all virtue and all piety; there was nothing to 
 be seen but diversion and stage-plays; the three kingdoms 
 were absolutely inundated with them, and morality everywhere 
 soon became shipwreck. Under pretext of drinking the 
 king's health, every kind of disorder, the worst excesses of 
 debauchery, were indulged in. Those who had been mixed 
 up with the revolution thought they could not better avert 
 the reproach and suspicion that weighed upon them than by 
 following the general current, by ridiculing, like the rest, all 
 that could be called religion, by relating or absolutely in- 
 venting anecdotes tending to convict their party of impiety 
 and absurdity." 
 
 The conduct pursued, after the king's arrival, by the par- 
 
56 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660. 
 
 liament, short-sighted and feeble as it had been in his recal, in 
 its forgetfulness of all national dignity, was far more serious 
 in its consequences. The commons declared, in an address 
 to the king, that they accepted, in the name of the towns and 
 boroughs of England, the gracious pardon offered by the de- 
 claration of Breda. When they came to consider the excep- 
 tions which this document left to their discretion, they carried 
 them so far that the king was obliged to moderate these de- 
 monstrations of their zeal, and to remind them that without 
 the confidence placed in his promises of oblivion of injuries, 
 neither he nor they would then be assembled in parliament. 
 At their solicitation, however, he published a proclamation, in 
 which he declared that all the judges of the late king who, 
 after the lapse of a fortnight, should not have placed themselves 
 in prison, should not participate in the amnesty. Forty-nine 
 of these judges, designated regicides, were still alive; ten suc- 
 ceeded in escaping, ten others were taken in their attempted 
 flight, and nineteen had the courage to come and surrender 
 themselves. The parliament, exercising their discretion under 
 the royal declaration, added to the number of regicides ex- 
 cluded from pardon, as to life and property, sir Harry Yane, 
 one of those who had most contributed to the condemnation 
 of the earl of Strafford, who, though distinguished among the 
 republicans by his talents and his zeal, had refused to act as 
 one of the judges of Charles I., and general Lambert, whom 
 it had too much reason at once to fear and to hate. A great 
 many other persons were declared incapable of holding any 
 office for the future. As to the deceased regicides, such as 
 Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, his son-in-law, Bradshaw the pre- 
 sident, Pride, one of the judges in this too famous court, it was 
 declared that their property should be confiscated, and that 
 they should be subjected to such other penalties as it should 
 please the king and parliament to inflict upon them. 
 
 In execution of this act, which was audaciously termed an 
 act of amnesty, the twenty-nine regicide prisoners were deli- 
 vered to a special commission, composed of courtiers, or of 
 men who had betrayed the cause of the revolution, and tried 
 upon the principle proclaimed by the two houses one of the 
 foundations of the English constitution, that no person, no 
 authority, not even the entire people, acting whether by 
 itself or by its representatives, had the right to exercise phy- 
 
1660.] TRIAL OF THE REGICIDES. 57 
 
 sical force upon a king of England. The judges of Charles I., 
 who were considered as having violated this principle, whilst 
 they themselves deemed that they had accomplished a great 
 act of justice, presented themselves to the special commission. 
 Devoted by anticipation, but still proudly erect, they sought 
 not by legal subtleties to avert a responsibility which their 
 very position rendered self-evident. Calm before a passion- 
 guided tribunal, they astonished consciences not altogether at 
 their ease, by the imperturbable conviction with which they 
 defended that which they had done, and which the nation had 
 but just learned to abjure. They were all condemned to 
 death : those who had surrendered themselves were reprieved, 
 the rest, ten in number, perished. Vainly, by the circum- 
 stances of their execution, did authority seek to involve them 
 in ignominy; even upon the scaffold they showed that death, in 
 their eyes, was not the punishment of a crime, but the conse- 
 quence of a reverse of fortune; even royalist historians have 
 admitted that they did honour to their cause by their martyr- 
 dom. In the course of the year, three other regicides, carried 
 off from Holland in defiance of the law of nations, terminated 
 their career in the same manner; and the exhumed bodies of 
 Pride, Ireton, Bradshaw, and Cromwell, were suspended from 
 gibbets, after having been insulted and desecrated by that 
 class of the populace to which revolutions bring little else 
 than these brutal gratifications. hadO to 
 
 Vane and Lambert were tried later, not as regicides, but 
 as enemies of the restoration. Lambert was condemned to 
 death ; the weakness he displayed on the occasion satisfied his 
 enemies, who allowed him to live. Vane maintained the great 
 reputation he had acquired throughout the storms of the long 
 parliament; he courageously represented to his judges that, 
 after the death of the king, the nation had been sovereign 
 de jure and de facto g and that royalty having then abandoned 
 its own cause, it was ridiculous for it to come and demand an 
 account of what had been done during its absence, and to 
 claim to punish acts which all Europe had respected. " I 
 could," said he, " have easily withdrawn into foreign parts 
 from the vengeance which has now fallen upon me; but fol- 
 lowing the example of some of the greatest men of antiquity, 
 I have preferred perishing in the defence of liberty, resolved 
 to assert by my blood the honourable cause for which I de- 
 
58 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660- 
 
 clared myself. " His last moments were worthy of this simple 
 and noble defence. Drums placed round the foot of the scaf- 
 fold prevented his voice, once so dear to the people, from 
 sending forth some dangerous truths. Vane was the last who 
 expiated with his head a share in the revolution; many other 
 independents lost their property and their liberty; tardy and 
 hesitating reprisals, which amounted to a sort of restoration 
 for their party. These acts of vengeance were fully as much 
 the result of presbyterian hatred as of royal resentment. They 
 were called acts of justice — striking and necessary examples. 
 This is ever the language of victorious factions, and of the 
 miserable knaves who cling to them, and for their protection 
 owe them proofs of devotion. There were many men of this 
 stamp in the lower chamber, ex-republicans, valets under 
 Cromwell, who now, as it were, regarded themselves as having 
 changed masters. The proscriptions settled, the servility of 
 some, and the real devotion of the rest, were displayed in 
 their eager assent to the ordinary and extraordinary subsidies 
 solicited by the court. The people's money was lavished with 
 a profusion altogether without example, even in times of the 
 most abject submission. The collection of the Acts of this 
 parliament, in the space of less than a year, evidence the 
 pillage of the public money, under the heads of sums voted 
 to pay arrears, current expenditure, indemnities, or even as 
 humble offerings. We there find — 
 
 50,000/. a present to his majesty; 20,000/. to the duke of 
 York; 12,000/. to the duke of Gloucester; 10,000/. to the 
 queen Henrietta of France, the king's mother; 10,000/. to 
 €ach of the princesses, her daughters. 
 
 An act for the continuation of the monthly tax of 70,000/., 
 which it had been found impracticable to collect since the 
 death of Cromwell. 
 
 Another act ordering the immediate collection of the 
 arrears of the tax for the last twelve months. 
 
 An act imposing a poll-tax for the payment of the fleet 
 and the army. 
 
 Another act to levy the sum necessary for disbanding the 
 army. 
 
 An act for raising the king's annual income to 1,200,000/. 
 Henry VIIL, by his exactions, had realized a revenue nearly 
 
1662.] LOYAL ENTHUSIASM OF PARLIAMENT. 59 
 
 as considerable; but no parliament bad ever assigned so large 
 an amount to any king. 
 
 An act to levy, within the space of a month, a sum of 
 100,000/., upon landed property, to meet the pressing wants 
 of his majesty. 
 
 An act for levying 140,000/. in anticipation of the 
 monthly tax of 70,000/. 
 
 Other acts imposed taxes upon beer, cider, and other 
 beverages ; interdicted the cultivation of tobacco in England 
 and Ireland, and granted sums for certain deficits in the pro- 
 duce of the taxes, or to compensate the king for some trifling 
 loss. It were impossible to give the exact total of all these 
 sums, which went, for the most part, to pay the foreign debts 
 of the princes, and the expenses of their long conspiracy 
 against the protectorate and the republic. The civil war had 
 cost less than the restoration; and all that civil war had 
 destroyed, to the enormous benefit of the people, was now 
 re-established amidst the insane acclamations of the multi- 
 tude. 
 
 The declaration of Breda had charged the parliament to 
 examine the titles by which many officers, soldiers, and 
 citizens held lands since the revolution; of the property thus 
 distributed, all that had belonged to the crown was restored at 
 once, and without indemnity; that which had belonged to the 
 chapters and to the Anglican bishops, was also regarded as 
 illegally obtained, and the holders were compelled to unquali- 
 fied restitution. The property of the lords of the royalist 
 party was only restored to a limited extent, because many of 
 the cavaliers had returned to England during the protectorate 
 and the republic, and had compounded for their lands with 
 those who had bought, or received them by way of public re- 
 compence. AJ1 such arrangements, being regarded as per- 
 fectly free on both sides, were adhered to. The royalists who 
 returned with the king, and who had not compounded, resumed 
 possession of their estates without in any way indemnifying 
 the purchasers. 
 
 The re-establi3hment of episcopacy as the state religion 
 was the necessary complement of the restoration. Already, 
 in pursuance of a royal proclamation, those of the former 
 Anglican bishops who were still alive, had returned to 
 
60 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660-1661. 
 
 their diocese ; the Anglican chapters had reconstituted 
 themselves, several churches were again thrown open for 
 this mode of worship, and an assembly of theologians had 
 received orders to revise the old liturgy, and to make 
 such alterations in it as might be deemed necessary. The 
 presbyterians were not entitled to complain of this, since 
 the proclamation of Breda promised equal protection to 
 all creeds ; but the assembly of theologians being desirous 
 of making out reasons for some decided preference, it was 
 considered that the presbyterian parliament would here 
 encounter the only interest capable of putting a stop to its 
 servile complaisance, and its dissolution was pronounced. 
 The king dismissed it with flattering phrases, and with pro- 
 mises for the future. He ever afterwards called this parlia- 
 ment, the good, the happy parliament ; alluding to the weak 
 confidence which it had displayed. h9bnQ ] 
 
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THE ANGLICAN SYSTEM. 61 
 
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 UilOW 3 THE ANGLICAN SYSTEM. * d l 
 
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 The Anglicans at the head of the counter-revolution — Prosecution of the 
 Scottish presbyterian leaders — System established in Scotland — Con- 
 ferences at the Savoy between the presbyterians and the Anglicans — Per- 
 secutions of the presbyterians— The act against the presbyterians ex- 
 tended to the papists, and all the nonconforming protestants— Intrigues 
 of the court to obtain a distinction in favour of the papists — Resist- 
 ance of the ministry and commencement of opposition in the par- 
 liament — Composition of this parliament — Its laws respecting the 
 army, corporations, the press, religion — Progress of the misunder- 
 standing between the king and his Anglican ministers — Declaration of 
 indulgences published by the king in favour of the papists — War with 
 Holland — Complaints of the parliamentary opposition — Failure of the 
 Anglican ministry to maintain a balance between the court and the par- 
 liament — The court and parliament overthrow the Anglican ministry. 
 
 The administration which had concurred with the presby- 
 terian parliament in the political restoration had, at the 
 same time, prepared against this assembly the religious 
 restoration, that is to say, the re-establishment of the 
 ancient national church. The three principal ministers, 
 the chancellor Clarendon, the lord treasurer Southampton, 
 and the duke of Ormond, were zealous Anglicans, because 
 they attributed to the presbyterian doctrines all the disor- 
 ders of the revolution; they were men estimable for the 
 private virtues and for the talents they had displayed at the 
 head of the cavalier party. It was the duke of Ormond who 
 had so long maintained the royal cause in Ireland against the 
 republican arms. The king, since his return, had given him 
 the viceroyalty of that country. Clarendon and South- 
 ampton had constantly accompanied the princes in their 
 
62 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660- 
 
 exile, and had powerfully aided them in their negotiations 
 with the foreign courts, and with the presbyterians, who 
 had brought about the restoration. The king had also 
 called to his councils, or raised to the upper house, some 
 illustrious deserters from the revolutionary cause; amongst 
 others, Ashley Cooper, Monk, created duke of Albemarle, 
 and Denzel Holies and the earl of Manchester, once the 
 determined adversaries of Charles, the former in parliament, 
 the latter at the head of armies. 
 
 The earl of Clarendon was the chief of this administration, 
 in which men full of zeal for the Anglican belief, were united 
 with others who, during the storms of the revolution, had 
 learnt to disbelieve everything, religious creeds alike with 
 political truths. The first contributed projects, the others 
 simply their means of action. This was an unfortunate 
 combination, for the projects were injudicious, and the means 
 of action were fraud and intrigue. Thus, to bring about the 
 re- establishment of Anglican uniformity, to hasten the dis- 
 banding of the army, and to provide against any outbreak on 
 the part of the disbanded troops, and to keep the nation in 
 that constant fear of disturbances, so favourable to the 
 interests of the crown, the policy pursued by a ministry 
 redeemed only by the private virtues of two or three of its 
 members, was to attribute to the presbyterians the worst and 
 most hostile designs, to the soldiers conspiracies, which it 
 secretly fomented, and to attach suspicion to men whose 
 reappearance in the next parliament it dreaded. A riot 
 attempted in the streets of London by a few millenarian 
 fanatics served as a pretext for the hrst attack upon the 
 presbyterians. A royal proclamation, restoring the old 
 denomination of nonconformists, as applied to all who did 
 not belong to the Anglican church, forbad these to hold 
 any religious assemblies out of their places of worship, until a 
 conference between the bishops and the presbyterian ministers 
 had regulated the existing differences on the subject of the 
 Liturgy. The prohibition applied to the presbyterians as well 
 as to the quakers and the millenarians; but events in Scot- 
 land more clearly warned the presbyterians of the fate 
 reserved for them by a ministry whom, from their hatred of 
 the republicans, they had already enabled to proceed to such 
 extremities. 
 
1662.] PERSECUTION OF THE SCOTTISH PRESBYTERIANS. 63 
 
 After the restoration, the council had deliberated whether 
 liberty should be restored to Scotland, or the military govern- 
 ment established by Cromwell be still maintained there. Not- 
 withstanding the joy which the Scots had manifested at the 
 restoration, Charles inclined to the latter proposition, which, 
 would secure to him for the future the submission of Scotland. 
 He yielded, however, to the representations of his ministers and 
 of the Scottish lord, Lauderdale, whose great services to the 
 royal cause had procured him much influence with the king. 
 Scotland was authorized to reconstitute her parliament, which 
 since the second invasion of Cromwell had ceased to exist. The 
 Scottish lord, Middleton, who was charged with the execution 
 of this measure, which he himself had opposed, made use of it 
 for the re-establishment of episcopacy in Scotland. He recalled 
 to the parliament the bishops, who had been excluded from this 
 body since the reign of James L, and succeeded in keeping 
 out those men who had acted as leaders of the presbyterians 
 during the revolution. Another question, also discussed in 
 the council, was, whether the amnesty of Breda, being ad- 
 dressed only to the English parliament, should be extended 
 to Scotland. In Scotland, where, as we have seen above, 
 there had been neither independents nor regicides, this act 
 of pardon could have no other object than that of re- assuring 
 the presbyterians, and Charles II. did not think it necessary 
 to display so much consideration towards them. He knew 
 that the Scottish presbyterians, as a religious sect, were far 
 more hostile to the absolute authority at which he aspired 
 than the English presbyterians were, as a political party. He 
 therefore availed himself of the special manner in v^hich his 
 promise of pardon designated his English subjects, to hurl 
 down upon the Scottish presbyterians the weight of a ven- 
 geance, which elsewhere he deemed it too perilous to execute. 
 The energy which they had displayed in commencing the in- 
 surrection with their own forces alone, and, later, during his 
 residence amongst them, the daring freedom with winch they 
 had censured his private conduct, were crimes which were 
 always present to his mind, and the punishment of which, his 
 courtiers urged, concerned the honour of the crown. His 
 lieutenant, Middleton, directed against lord Argyle, the pos- 
 sessor of immense domains in the west of Scotland, and the 
 most ancient and distinguished of the presbyterian chiefs, an 
 
64 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [ 1 660- 
 
 impeachment concocted in the privy council. A confidential 
 correspondence between the earl and Monk was produced in 
 support of the impeachment. This correspondence, which 
 Monk infamously delivered up, vaguely established that part 
 of the accusation admitted by the Scottish parliament in the 
 terms invented by Middleton — namely, the presumption of 
 complicity in the death of the king. The letters of Argyle 
 proved that he had been intimate with some of the judges of 
 Charles I., but in no degree that he had approved of their 
 sentence; however, the presumption was declared sufficient 
 Argyle, condemned to death, was executed at Edinburgh, in 
 presence of a vast assemblage, who were deeply affected by the 
 sight of his white hairs, his calm resolution, the fervour of his 
 prayers, and his protestations of attachment to the covenant. 
 
 Middleton next, from among the presbyterian ministers, 
 selected for trial as a factious perturbator, one Guthrie, 
 whose condemnation he knew would be particularly agreeable 
 to Charles II., because this minister was one of those who 
 had offended him by their remonstrances while he was in 
 Scotland. As there was no precise charge made against 
 him, he defended himself as a man fully convinced that 
 authority was resolved to make an example of him; and he 
 disconcerted all the hopes of those who wished to save him. 
 He received his sentence of condemnation as the promise of 
 a "'martyrdom, the object of his wishes. "I saw him exe- 
 cuted," says Burnet; "it was less resolution than a perfect 
 disdain of death. He spoke for an hour upon the scaffold 
 with a calmness which seemed more to belong to a preacher 
 who delivers a sermon than to a man who pronounces his 
 last words. He j ustified his conduct, and exhorted the people 
 to remain faithful to the covenant, which he exalted in 
 pompous terms."- 
 
 After Guthrie's execution, other men who had been dis- 
 tinguished in the presbyterian party as opponents of royalty, 
 or of the tyranny of Cromwell or that of Monk, were tried 
 and condemned, but obtained their pardon; which, morally, 
 was equally grievous to the presbyterian party. 
 
 In England, the conference, called the conference of the 
 Savoy, having been prolonged through several months with- 
 out bringing the Anglican bishops and the presbyterians to 
 agree upon any one point, was dissolved; and almost at the 
 
1662.] POLICY OF CLARENDON. . 65 
 
 same time a new parliament was convoked, destined to make 
 brief work of the questions so fruitlessly discussed in the con- 
 ference. The elections had taken place amidst the rejoicings 
 at the coronation of Charles II. The nation had hitherto 
 applauded every act of vengeance upon the republicans. The 
 confidence placed in the intentions of the monarch and of his 
 ministers was so great, that the elections had everywhere 
 fallen upon the candidate supported by the court. The pres- 
 byterians thus numbered very few members; and it was 
 the same with the cavaliers, to whom the ministry thought it 
 politic not to manifest any peculiar favour. The new mem- 
 bers were landed proprietors, barristers, merchants, people in 
 office; all of them steeped in the infatuation of royalism 
 which pervaded the entire population. Yet the ministry, in 
 supporting them as sincere friends, were mistaken, as they 
 themselves mistook the true character of the hatred which 
 they exhibited against the revolution. In general, as to 
 religion, they had got back into a vague protestantism. 
 Weary of the infinite quarrels among sectaries, whose zeal 
 now appeared merely a dangerous, half-insane folly, they were 
 inclined to think that the re-establishment of episcopacy in 
 its old supremacy was necessary for the confirmation of 
 royalty. 
 
 At the opening of the session, the chancellor Clarendon 
 strengthened this tendency by drawing a sombre picture of 
 the perilous aspect presented by the insubordinate spirit of 
 the preachers and soldiers. He said, that certain scandalous 
 discourses delivered from the pulpit, coupled with the indi- 
 cations furnished by an extensive correspondence which had 
 been intercepted, showed that the restoration had many 
 hidden enemies. He added, that he would not name any 
 particular person or any sect; but that, in a general manner, 
 he would not hesitate to affirm that the enemies of the 
 Anglican church were also the ,enemies of the existing 
 political system. The chancellor's speech, dictated, accord- 
 ing to every appearance, far less by the conviction that 
 any such dangers existed, than by his hatred to the pres- 
 byterian party, made a deep impression upon the lower 
 house, which immediately resolved, by a considerable majo- 
 rity, that all its members should, on a certain day, publicly 
 receive the communion according to the Anglican liturgy. It 
 
 F 
 
66 HISTORY OP THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1660- 
 
 also ordered that the Scottish covenant, and the act under the 
 same title, adopted by the presbyterian parliament in 1643, 
 should be burnt by the hangman. The war thus declared against 
 the political and religious doctrines of the presbyterians was 
 energetically followed up. The act of the 17th year of 
 Charles L, which excluded the bishops from the upper 
 house, was revoked by another act. An act entitled the 
 Corporation Act, ordered that for the future, in order to be 
 assured that all the members of corporations were attached 
 to royalty, every mayor, alderman, common councilman, or 
 simple officer of the corporation, should, in addition to the 
 former oaths of allegiance and supremacy, take an oath of 
 abjuration of the covenant, and another in these terms: 
 " I, A. B., do solemnly declare that it is not lawful, upon 
 any pretence whatsoever, to take up arms against the king; 
 and that I do abhor the traitorous position of taking arms 
 by his authority against his person, or against those who are 
 commissioned by him, in pursuance of such commission. 
 And I do swear that I will not, at any time to come, en- 
 deavour the alteration of the government, either in church 
 or state. So help me God." This oath was a bitter con- 
 demnation of the past conduct of the presbyterians; a con- 
 duct which they had, however, disavowed by effecting the 
 restoration. Another act was drawn up to establish uni- 
 formity in the public prayers and in the administration of the 
 sacraments. 
 
 A short prorogation of parliament took place, during which 
 the ministry made every effort to dispose the public mind for 
 receiving this act. The means employed were the same 
 which had been already adopted since there were no longer 
 regicides or marked republicans to attack. A rumour was 
 got up of a vast conspiracy, plotted in common by all the 
 nonconformists, and which was to break out by the insurrec- 
 tion of the disbanded soldiery. No doubt there were many 
 of these men, who, in their tavern-meetings, seriously dis- 
 cussed the means of overthrowing, without chiefs or arms as 
 they were, an order of things which they had not been able 
 to prevent the establishment of when they had arms in their 
 hands; but these were ideas inspired by regret for the past, 
 and present distress. Cromwell's body of police, who had 
 passed into the service of the king's ministers, knew and 
 
1662.] THE ACT OF UNIFORMITY. 67 
 
 watched these ex-officers. They had recently been for- 
 bidden to approach within twenty miles of London. The 
 population had everywhere declared against them. The 
 chancellor Clarendon must have known how little they were 
 to be feared, how little the explosions of religious enthu- 
 siasm which might burst from the presbyterian pulpits were 
 likely to be contagious. He had not, and could not, furnish 
 any proof of -the existence of the plots which he denounced; 
 yet the fears which it suited him to feign communicated them- 
 selves to men less in a position to judge of the reality of the 
 danger; and the parliament, as soon as it met, voted the Act 
 of Uniformity. 
 
 By this act, it was ordained that all ministers should, on 
 penalty of losing their benefices and being prosecuted under 
 laws anterior to the revolution, conform to the worship of 
 the Anglican church, according to the ritual just revised; 
 should declare upon oath their approval of the entire contents 
 of that work; should present themselves before the bishop to 
 receive ordination, and should renew their oath to the king 
 as head of the Anglican church. A brief interval was 
 allowed them in which to prepare for this abjuration of their 
 principles and their discipline. The reader is aware, that one 
 of the prerogatives denied to Charles I. by the presbyterians, 
 was the disposal of the armed forces of the kingdom, "and that 
 it was upon this question the rupture more immediately took 
 place; the present parliament, dominated by the idea that 
 the only way to preserve royalty from fresh dangers would be 
 to render it stronger than it had ever yet been, passed a 
 resolution that the government, the administration and dis- 
 posal of the militia, of the army and navy, and of all fortified 
 places, was, by the laws of the kingdom, the right of his 
 majesty; that neither of the houses of parliament nor both 
 together, had power to make war, defensively or offensively, 
 upon their lawful sovereign; that, accordingly, all lords- 
 lieutenants of counties, generals, officers, soldiers, and sailors, 
 should be called upon to take the following oath: " I, A. B., 
 do declare that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatso- 
 ever, to take arms against the king; that I do abhor that 
 traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against 
 his person, or against those that are commissioned by him." 
 This was almost word for word the same oath which had just 
 
 f2 
 
68 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION, [1662- 
 
 been imposed upon the members of corporations. The prin- 
 ciples enumerated in these various acts were supported by 
 rigorous penalties. Attacks, direct or indirect, seditious 
 remarks spoken or written against the person of the king, 
 any observations questioning the power which parliament 
 acknowledged to belong to him, in virtue of his right of suc- 
 cession to the crown, were declared to be high treason. The 
 attacks which might proceed from the press being most 
 easily provided against, parliament took especial steps to an- 
 ticipate them. 
 
 The press had not become a power until the Anglican 
 reformation made use of it against Catholicism; but even 
 then, Henry VIII. had kept it in check by limiting its exer- 
 cise to the production of bibles, prayer-books, and contro- 
 versial works directed against popery. Queen Mary made 
 the printing of books the privilege of a company, bound to 
 observe strict regulations, and subject to the arbitrary juris- 
 diction of the Star Chamber. The number of presses and 
 of working printers had been limited under the following 
 reigns; and throughout the revolution the press had been 
 equally restricted by the various parties who had been suc- 
 cessively victorious; but in these days of confusion and ex- 
 citement, when the most rigorous laws failed to silence the 
 utterance of thought, the clandestine press produced the 
 greater portion of those writings which influenced the public 
 mind, and a prodigious number of obscure pamphlets. At 
 the period which this history has now attained, parliament 
 gave the privilege of the press to a corporation, called the- 
 Stationers' Company, with the following regulations: books 
 connected with law and legislation were to be sanctioned by 
 the chancellor or one of the judges; works of history or of a 
 political nature, by the secretary of state; works on heraldry, 
 by the king at arms; and works on theology, physics, and 
 philosophy, by the bishop of London and the archbishop of 
 Canterbury. Books printed at the Universities were to be 
 subject to the licence of the respective chancellors. The 
 number of printers employed by the company was limited to 
 twenty, each of whom was to provide good security. The 
 censors might require the name of the author of every work 
 to be given to them. It was further enacted, that, by the 
 order of the secretary of state, or on the demand of the pri- 
 
1663.] PERSECUTION OF THE NONCONFORMISTS. 69 
 
 vileged company, the king's officers might forcibly, and 
 wherever they found them, take possession of all works pub- 
 lished clandestinely, or which had not been licensed by the 
 censors; and that the authors of all such works should be 
 liable to the jurisdiction of a tribunal, consisting solely of the 
 bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury; finally, 
 that for the future no printing press should be permitted, 
 except in the cities of York and London, or in the principal 
 universities. The act was to remain in force for three 
 years, at the expiration of which period its provisions might 
 be renewed, or modified every three years. 
 
 The government had thus to carry into execution, at one 
 and the same time, important laws respecting the press, the 
 disbanded troops, the corporations, the army, and religion; 
 laws, all of them more or less tyrannical, but as yet not so 
 regarded by the nation, because they applied only to people 
 whose disaffection towards the established government was 
 openly manifested. The Corporation act gave rise to much 
 vexation. The officers charged with administering the oath 
 in the counties and towns at a distance from London, 
 ejected from the corporations all those whom they did not 
 consider imbued with the existing principles of the house of 
 commons, and exercised very great rigour in the process of 
 expulsion. They levelled the walls of several towns which 
 had signalised themselves in the wars against Charles I. 
 The Act of Uniformity obliged many ministers to abandon 
 their livings, and in some counties the repugnance of the 
 people to attend the Anglican churches, and to take part in a 
 service performed by clergymen in surplices, was extreme. 
 It was not, however, in this way that the favourite work of 
 Clarendon, of the bishops, and of the lower house was to 
 be assailed. 
 
 Under the general name of nonconformists, the Anglican 
 church persecuted at once the anabaptists, the millenarians, the 
 presbyterians, and the catholics. Now, the latter had powerful 
 supporters at court, and, more than this, were filled with 
 high hopes. The papists had been throughout the civil war 
 the indefatigable partisans of Charles I. During the exile 
 of the princes they had not, like the presbyterians, and 
 many members of the church of England, concurred in the 
 despotism of Cromwell. The king, as we have seen, pre- 
 
70 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1662- 
 
 ferred this religion to all others, not as one of purer doctrine, 
 but as one better adapted to promote the interests of mo- 
 narchies. The duke of York, his brother, had a still more 
 decided inclination for it; though intimately connected with 
 the minister, Clarendon, whose daughter he had first seduced 
 and then married, and of whose general administration he 
 was a strenuous supporter, he censured him warmly for 
 this persecution, common to catholics with presbyterians. 
 The queen-mother was a zealous catholic. The king since 
 his return had wedded a papist princess. The court was 
 filled with priests of this religion, in the service of the 
 two queens; these circumstances determined Charles in re- 
 quiring of his ministers and the lower house, to make a 
 distinction in favour of the catholics, and, not obtaining his 
 object, he complained that the promise he had given in his 
 declaration of Breda was broken against his will. He had 
 announced equal toleration for all, he said, and he would give 
 it; he was master, and he needed no other person's sanction. 
 The ministers, Clarendon and Southampton, represented to 
 him, that if there was one sentiment which, more powerfully 
 than any other, predominated in the breast of Englishmen, it 
 was the hatred of popery; that the gunpowder-plot, the execu- 
 tions under queen Mary, the massacre in Ireland, were not 
 forgotten; that the slightest mark of favour given to the 
 papists would again raise into importance the presbyterians, 
 and other men still more dangerous; and that, since rigorous 
 measures against the presbyterians were deemed essential, 
 it was equally essential to preserve these measures from un-, 
 popularity, that they should be extended to the papists and to 
 all nonconformists whatsoever. These arguments failed to 
 influence the king, who intimated his intention to publish a pro- 
 clamation modifying, in favour of all nonconformists without 
 exception, the excessive severity of the act of parliament. 
 
 This was the commencement of a misunderstanding be- 
 tween the king and his Anglican ministers, which, on the 
 part of the former, became determined hostility, and, before 
 long, he yielded without reserve to the inclination which 
 drew him towards other men, whose personal profligacy 
 encouraged his ow^n — men, who were the companions of his 
 debaucheries, and the obsequious flatterers of his mistresses; 
 men, who were enriched by his prodigality at the expense of 
 
1663.] the king's favourites. 71 
 
 the people. Regarded with dislike by Clarendon and South- 
 ampton, who throughout had inspired the king rather with 
 respect than with either confidence or friendship, they de- 
 stroyed the credit of those ministers, by scoffing at their prin- 
 ciples, by insinuating distrust of their intentions, and by 
 ridiculing their language and their manners. The latter 
 expedient was of all powerful effect with Charles II., who 
 infinitely preferred the councils of men who amused him by the 
 sallies of their wit, and interested him by their brilliant vices. 
 First among these was Buckingham, whom a precocious matu- 
 rity in every sort of corruption had, from earliest manhood, 
 rendered master of the weak and profligate mind of Charles 
 IL; then Ashley Cooper, less noted for the disorders of his 
 private life than for his political treachery, and whose con- 
 duct at the period of the restoration has been described; next 
 came Bennett, afterwards earl of Arlington, a man said to 
 be skilful in state affairs, but whose part at court was merely 
 that of a subordinate go-between; Berkley, who shared with 
 him the superintendence of the king's pleasures and the 
 management of the royal mistresses; Crawford, a man whose 
 inferior talents were compensated in the opinion of his profli- 
 gate associates, by his pre-eminent capacity for debaucheries of 
 every kind ; lastly, the Scottish earl Lauderdale, a cold libertine, 
 who, unlike the other favourites, was a man of dull mind and 
 awkward exterior, but who secured the attachment of Charles 
 II. by the ardour with which he concurred in every measure of 
 tyranny. Each of these men had about him two or three 
 dependents, of a quality presenting some analogy with those 
 which had procured his own elevation to favour, and in such 
 company Charles passed all the time which he did not give 
 to his mistresses, or could refuse to his ministers. It may 
 readily be imagined that these councillors, most of them 
 overwhelmed with debt and leading dissolute lives, would, 
 in common with the king, desire that the parliament should 
 be brought to a state of submission, of more practical utility 
 than that which consisted in protestations of loyalty. The 
 cry with all of them at this moment was, Toleration. The earl 
 of Bristol, who participated in their intrigues, out of personal 
 hatred to Clarendon, and because, having, while in exile, 
 embraced the catholic religion, he felt himself endangered by 
 the act against nonconformists, exerted himself to the 
 
72 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [ [1663- 
 
 utmost to stifle in its birth the Anglican opposition, favoured, 
 as he said, by the treachery of the chancellor. 
 
 This opposition manifested itself from the first moment 
 that the favour of the king towards the catholics became per- 
 ceptible. The royalist fervour, which had animated the first 
 sittings of the lower house, while the nation was under ap- 
 prehension of the independents and of the presbyterians, had 
 passed away with the danger which called it forth. The ma- 
 jority did not at all pique itself upon abstract patriotism; the 
 very word was still under proscription, from the constant use 
 which had been made of it by the republicans. Many mem- 
 bers held offices under the court; yet, at the first breath of new 
 alarms, the house armed itself against its known and against 
 its hidden foes, with an inexorable dictature, which it would 
 have been perilous to have sought to wrest from it. Charles IL, 
 reduced to the necessity of mitigating the condition of 
 the catholics, by means of toleration, published, contrary to 
 the wishes of his ministers, a declaration of indulgence, 
 the tardy fulfilment of his promises from Breda, which had 
 been so frequently invoked by the proscribed republicans. 
 Citing the 'article of the Breda declaration which announced 
 liberty of conscience : " We at first applied ourself," said 
 he, "thoroughly to establish the uniformity of the Angli- 
 can church in all that concerns discipline, ceremonials, 
 and government, and we continue firmly resolved to main- 
 tain it; but as to the punishment of such as, comporting 
 themselves peacefully, still feel a difficulty, from misdirected 
 delicacy of conscience, in conforming to the English church, 
 and practise, without indecency, the worship suited to their 
 principles, we purpose as far as it may be in our power, and 
 without prejudice to the privileges of parliament, to call upon 
 the wisdom of parliament in the next session, to concur with 
 us in some measure that shall authorize us, with general con- 
 sent, to exercise the dispensing power which we deem inherent 
 to our royal person." 
 
 Notwithstanding the extreme reserve with which the king 
 here expressed himself, the parliament that met shortly after 
 the publication of the declaration of indulgence, did not accept 
 its affected scrupulousness for the fulfilment of a promise 
 which experience had already more than once shown to be 
 altogether futile. The house of commons, meeting artifice 
 
1664.] PROCEEDINGS OF PARLIAMENT. 73 
 
 with artifice, represented that the king's promises had been 
 only conditional, and that the two houses, fulfilling the confi- 
 dence which he had displayed in them, when he left it to them 
 to make what exceptions and limitations they thought fit, had 
 resolved to release him from obligations which might be pro- 
 ductive of detriment to the Anglican ehurch and favour the 
 Catholic schism. An address, following up this remonstrance, 
 prayed the king to lay aside that extreme indulgence which 
 had brought into England so many Komish priests and Jesuits, 
 and required from him a 23roclamation, commanding all such 
 persons to quit the kingdom within a certain brief time. 
 Ministers urged upon the king the essential necessity of satis- 
 fying the parliament in this matter, and he accordingly issued 
 a proclamation; but an exception, introduced by the consent 
 of parliament itself, in favour of the priests attached to the 
 service of the two queens and of the ambassadors from Catho- 
 lic powers, neutralized the whole measure for a host of Eng- 
 lish priests remained under shelter of this exception, which 
 availed them for a long time. The declaration of indulgence 
 was practically maintained. /J b^o/al vJtnauptWi o : 
 
 In the same session the commons* granted the king, at his 
 request, an increase of his civil list, which they raised from 
 1,200,000/. to 2,000,000/.; they passed over/ without any ex- 
 pression of dissatisfaction, the sale of Dunkirk to the French, 
 a transaction sanctioned by Clarendon,: and the proceeds of 
 which had been almost instantly dissipated fey the king in 
 vicious prodigality. Less compliant upon the question of his 
 authority with reference to the disposal of the militia, the 
 commons passed a resolution that the king could not keep 
 them under arms for more than a fortnight in each year, a 
 resolution intended less to relieve the militia, than to prevent 
 the king from making an instrument of that body. In the 
 following session, Charles answered this mark of distrust by 
 displaying a solicitude for his royal prerogative even exceed- 
 ing that which parliament had hitherto manifested. The 
 new attitude of this assembly operated as a warning that, 
 ere long, if unchecked, it might proceed still further; 
 he required from it the repeal of the triennial bill, as- 
 sented to, twenty-four years before, by Charles, and in 
 virtue of which the two houses were empowered to meet 
 of their own act, at the expiration of three years, should 
 
74 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1664- 
 
 tlie king refuse or neglect to convoke them. Parliament 
 repealed the act, which was drawn up in terms which did not 
 meet its present views, and contented itself with retaining 
 the general provision that no interval of parliament should ex- 
 ceed three years. On its part, parliament passed several new 
 laws against the nonconformists, without distinction of sect. 
 It was enacted that if more than five persons beyond the 
 number composing a family, assembled with that family for 
 any religious exercise, each person present should for the first 
 offence pay a fine of 51., or undergo three months imprison- 
 ment; for the second offence, 10/., or six months imprisonment; 
 and for the third offence, a fine of 100/., or be transported 
 beyond seas for seven years. 
 
 A resolution passed in the same session, by the house of 
 commons, on the subject of certain commercial grievances of 
 England against Holland, occasioned a rupture with this 
 republic, at that time the immediate rival of England. The 
 almost European war which ensued, diverted for a while that 
 legal struggle, but just commenced, in which, on the one 
 hand, parliament, under cover of religious convictions, sought 
 to regain by degrees the national liberties which the weakness 
 of the presbyterian parliament had entirely sacrificed, whilst 
 on the other hand, royalty, compelled by its daily recurring 
 necessities to abate more and more of its original pretensions, 
 imperceptibly lost again the ground which it had so rapidly 
 recovered. 
 
 The commercial prejudices of England, her hatred of a 
 new people, inferior to herself in power, but who yet, by dint 
 of skill and industry, were not unsuccessfully competing with 
 lier in all the markets of the world; the financial embarrass- 
 ments in which the king was involved, and which a war alone 
 could terminate; the intrigues and turbulent projects of 
 the daring and ambitious men who shared his pleasures; 
 the solicitations of the duke of York, a man strongly im- 
 pressed with the idea of maintaining and extending the 
 colonial interests of England, and who, consummately skilled 
 in every branch of the theory of navigation, desired an 
 opportunity of putting his knowledge to practical use, and of 
 thus giving himself distinction; finally, the opinion generally 
 prevalent, and not without some foundation, that the Dutch 
 were endeavouring to reinstate the republican party in 
 England, and were in active correspondence with the presby- 
 
1665.] THE FIVE MILE ACT. 75 
 
 terians of Scotland: all these circumstances combined to 
 decide the ministry in favour of war, and war was accordingly 
 declared by the king, after protracted negotiations which gave 
 both nations time to prepare for maintaining at home the 
 hostilities which had already begun in] their remote colonies. 
 Parliament granted to the king, to defray the expenses of the 
 war, the largest subsidy (2,500,000/.) that ever king of 
 England had obtained, and in return experienced no opposi- 
 tion to the laws which it was pleased to frame against those 
 internal enemies whose alliance with the Dutch appeared 
 no longer matter of doubt. 
 
 Whilst the duke of York, with a numerous fleet, assailed 
 the Dutch at sea, and Denmark and France, who had given 
 way since the commencement of the dispute to the tortuous 
 combinations of the famous Balance of Europe system, took 
 part with the United Provinces, parliament at home passed 
 against the nonconformists the Five Mile Act. This mea- 
 sure prohibited the refractory ministers, under a penalty of 
 six months' imprisonment and a fine of fifty pounds, from 
 coming within five miles of the place where, in consequence 
 of their nonconformity, they had ceased to exercise their 
 ministry. 
 
 These new restrictions, with those resulting from the act 
 against private assemblies called conventicles, were intended 
 to drive the nonconformist presbyterians to extremities; but 
 in England public opinion was already greatly modified. The 
 conduct of the parliament, comprehended in its meaning by 
 many rigid presbyterians, decided them to submission and to a 
 junction with the anti-papist system, by means of which the 
 episcopalians had created the only legal resistance at all prac- 
 ticable. Those nonconformists who, less politic or more un- 
 bending, persevered in exposing themselves to the rigour of 
 the laws, were pitied, but not supported. After the terrible 
 persecutions that had been witnessed, in a period when any 
 resistance was visited with death, men were very ill disposed 
 to agitation about mere fines and imprisonments. 
 
 The case was altogether different in Scotland; that un- 
 happy country still continued to be governed by a stupid, 
 obtuse parliament, acting wholly under the dictation of lord 
 Rothes, a man exactly resembling lord Middleton, whom he 
 had succeeded in office, and of the privy council at London, 
 and of another, regularly corresponding with this, at Edin- 
 
76 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1665- 
 
 burgh. The Act of Uniformity, immediately after its publi- 
 cation in England, had been adopted by the Scottish parlia- 
 ment. The bishops despatched from England to superintend 
 the re-establishment of episcopacy in Scotland, were, with 
 the exception of Leighton, himself one of the most virtuous 
 and most learned men of his time, either people of no cha- 
 racter, and ready to allow any tyranny to be exercised in 
 their names, or actual creatures of the intriguer Sharp, who 
 had been appointed archbishop of St. Andrews. This Sharp 
 was a wretch, who throughout the revolution had worn every 
 mask, and feigned each fanaticism that had successively be- 
 come the order of the day. His vehement professions of in- 
 ordinate zeal for the person of the monarch had, since the resto- 
 ration, placed and kept him in favour. He was the close 
 friend of lord Rothes, and, like that nobleman, involved 
 royalty in general odium by his connexion with it. 
 
 The religious revolution which these persons had under- 
 taken to effect in Scotland by violence, could only be the 
 work of time. Here resistance had its bulwark in the man- 
 ners and morals of the people, and not in their interests. 
 The natural tendency of the Scots to exaltation found in the 
 contemplation of an invisible world an attraction to which the 
 sufferings of actual life, the horrors of persecution, gave a still 
 higher colouring. The ministers of that presbyterian creed, 
 so dear to the nation, had, says an historian of the period, 
 brought the people to so advanced a condition of mental 
 culture, that even the commonest labourers and servants 
 extemporized prayers with a fluency of ideas and a facility 
 of expression which astonished even persons who were 
 prejudiced against them. They assembled in the evening 
 to pray and read the Scriptures, and at these meetings 
 every one present, man and woman, was requested to 
 communicate his or her thoughts to the rest. It was by 
 this mental discipline that the people had attained a degree 
 of knowledge and learning on theological subjects which has 
 never been met with elsewhere among the same classes. 
 When the Scottish presbyterians were prevented from fulfill 
 ing these pious rites in their churches, most of which were 
 shut up, they assembled in their houses, or in the open air. 
 The Conventicle act prohibited these meetings, but it was no 
 easy matter to surprise those who repaired to them. The 
 
1667.] INSURRECTION IN SCOTLAND. 77 
 
 people mutually aided each other, and refused to serve as 
 witnesses against one another; the churches were generally 
 abandoned, and if any one presented himself there at all, it 
 was merely to insult the intruding minister nominated by the 
 ecclesiastical council under the presidency of Sharp. In the 
 western districts, where resistance was favoured by the moun- 
 tainous character of the country, the presbyterians went 
 armed to the conventicles. The local agents of authority 
 being unable to suppress these assemblages, the king sent a 
 reinforcement of regular troops, under the command of one 
 Turner, who seized the principal inhabitants as hostages, and 
 scoured the country with a list of those who did not attend 
 the churches, from whom he rigorously exacted fines, and, in 
 addition, personally misused when he was intoxicated, a cir- 
 cumstance of frequent occurrence. His soldiers, billeted 
 upon the people, were left wholly to their own discretion, and, 
 assured of impunity, committed every description of outrage. 
 Such was the situation of Scotland when war broke out 
 with Holland; the presbyterians were so cruelly persecuted, 
 that ready faith might be placed in any rumour of their hold- 
 ing correspondence with the enemy. Charles II. received 
 from his agents at Rotterdam information that the Scottish 
 refugees there were in active agitation, and that the States- 
 general seemed disposed to assist them with money and arms. 
 He immediately summoned from Russia generals Dalziel and 
 Drummond, two officers who had served him in the civil 
 wars, and whose hard souls he knew to be proof against any 
 touch of pity. These men were despatched into Scotland 
 with considerable forces, which they were directed to quarter 
 upon fresh districts of the country. The apprehension of 
 being utterly exterminated drove the presbyterians to revolt. 
 Two thousand men, suddenly collected at Dumfries under the 
 command of their ministers and of two or three retired officers, 
 proclaimed the covenant, and seized upon Turner, whom, 
 however, they dismissed unharmed, when they found, from a 
 perusal of his papers, that he had been far from carrying out 
 the barbarous instructions given him under the hands and seals 
 of Sharp and lord Rothes. General Dalziel marched from 
 Edinburgh at the head of his regular and disciplined troops 
 against the half-armed, half-clothed insurgents, who were 
 designated whigs. He met them advancing to attack him* 
 
78 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1665- 
 
 'and had no difficulty in compelling them to retreat. The 
 presbyterians, hemmed in upon the Pentland -hills, killed some 
 half dozen of the royalist soldiers, and themselves lost forty 
 men; most of the remainder made their escape. This skir- 
 mish sufficed to end the rebellion. Dalziel sent the leaders 
 prisoners to Edinburgh. 
 
 Archbishop Sharp, who, from the first intelligence of the 
 outbreak up to that of Dalziel's victory, had exhibited the 
 most despicable pusillanimity, now resumed all his sangui- 
 nary energy in the punishment of the unhappy prisoners. 
 Ten of them were called upon to choose between abjuration 
 of the covenant or death, and they unhesitatingly adopted 
 the latter alternative. They were all hanged, after having, 
 under protracted tortures, given their testimony, as they 
 expressed it, to the covenant. Maccail, one of their minis- 
 ters, was in particular subjected by the executioners to the 
 utmost refinement of suffering which their cruelty could 
 invent; but nothing availed to overcome his resolution, and 
 the torturers gave over their task in very weariness. Whilst 
 they were breaking his limbs with iron wedges, he exclaimed: 
 " Farewell, sun, moon, and stars! Farewell, world and time! 
 Farewell, poor, fragile body! Behold, I see before me eter- 
 nity! I see before me God, the universal judge!" 
 
 Whilst, in the name of the king, these horrors were being 
 committed at Edinburgh, Dalziel had quartered his soldiers 
 over the insurgent country, and, to use his own phrase, was 
 converting the inhabitants to episcopacy; in other words, 
 driving them by force to the episcopal churches. He abso- 
 lutely threatened to spit and roast alive those who refused to 
 obey; and with his Moscovite habits, this would have seemed 
 to him merely one mode of punishing among the rest open to 
 him. He himself, in drunken fits, killed several recusants 
 with his own hand; and ere long diffused so general and so 
 profound a terror, that when the king deemed it advisable to 
 recal him, with Sharp and lord Rothes, the unhappy presbyte- 
 rians had become so subdued that they did all that was re- 
 quired of them, though under the immediate influence of far 
 less rigorous means. 
 
 These atrocities took place during the war with Holland. 
 It is painful, on turning to what was passing contempo- 
 raneously in England, to have to admit that, horrible as these 
 
1667.1 
 
 PERSECUTION OF THE SCOTS. 
 
 79 
 
 atrocities were, they almost inevitably resulted from the 
 system adopted by the English parliament and ministry. 
 They are a melancholy illustration of the effects of religious 
 intolerance, when employed as a political weapon. In the 
 hands of the Anglican party, this weapon was made use of 
 against the papists; and it so happened that each blow it 
 struck at the papists fell also upon the presbyterians. It is 
 very possible, that English liberty owes no inconsiderable 
 debt to the fearful policy which consented to the extermina- 
 tion of one class in order to secure the persecution of an- 
 other; but never, throughout the revolution, was that noble 
 cause promoted by more odious means. Never has the 
 detestable sophism of wholesome murder so flagrantly out- 
 raged all reason and humanity; and yet the same horror has 
 never attached to the names of the leaders of the Restoration 
 long parliament as to those of Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, 
 and the members of the Rump parliament. The reason is, that 
 the times which have since elapsed have not been such as to 
 allow of full justice being rendered; that the prejudices which 
 then blinded the Anglican opposition have not even yet 
 passed away. 
 
 Yet, of the just abhorrence inspired by the persecution of 
 the Scottish presbyterians at this period, the far larger pro- 
 portion should fall upon Charles II. ; he was the chief culprit, 
 not from the negligence which he generally manifested in 
 public affairs, but, on the contrary, from the eager solicitude 
 with which he sought out men capable of the utmost excesses, 
 first in ruling, and then in reducing those whom he inso- 
 lently designated a nation of brutes. The parliament 
 allowed him to take his own course in the matter unques- 
 tioned, thus adopting all the consequences of its laws against 
 the nonconformists. These laws were not, as regarded 
 many of the members, the result of that cold calculation 
 which has been made a reproach against Clarendon, but 
 of the habit of intolerance engendered by two centuries of 
 religious strife. The parties who had effected the triumph, 
 and then lost the cause of the revolution, had given to this 
 great social movement its religious character; and, since the 
 post, abandoned by the presbyterians, was at this time menaced 
 by that Christian sect, which, of all others, had most blood to 
 expend in its struggle for rule, the course pursued by the 
 
80 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1667- 
 
 Anglican parliament to maintain the attitude which the force 
 of circumstances had enabled it to assume, merits more than 
 ordinary attention. 
 
 One fact that may, to a certain extent, explain its indif- 
 ference on this subject, is, that at the time it abandoned the 
 Scottish presbyterians to the tyranny of Sharp and of the 
 earl of Rothes, the English parliament was itself surrounded 
 by scenes of desolate affliction, and by cries of public distress. 
 The subsidies, so lavishly granted to the king to defray the 
 expenses of the war, had been employed, before the eyes of 
 the whole population, to purchase the favours of dissolute 
 Women. The progress of the war had been most unfavourable 
 to England: the famous admiral, De Ruyter, burned and 
 sunk whole squadrons; the sailors were ill paid and ill fed; 
 the plague had half depopulated London; and this scourge 
 had scarce begun to pass away, when a terrible fire destroyed 
 thirteen thousand houses in the metropolis. De Ruyter at 
 length carried his daring so far as to insult the coasts and 
 ports of England, and, sailing up the Thames, threw' terror 
 into London itself. Peace alone could terminate this multipli- 
 cation of dangers and disasters; it was accordingly concluded 
 at Breda, upon conditions altogether humiliating to England. 
 
 At this juncture, discontent becoming general, dissipated 
 the old distinctions of party; the public sympathy received, 
 with a feeling wholly adverse to Charles, the complaints of 
 some of his faithful adherents, whom, when he could dispense 
 with their services, he had left to exist in misery, while 
 favourites and courtezans wallowed in a luxury which seemed 
 to grow more and more monstrous in proportion as the public 
 calamities grew more and more overwhelming. All the 
 rumours respecting the conduct of the duke of York with the 
 fleet; the conjectures created by his total insensibility amidst 
 the fire of London; the accounts of the debaucheries which 
 the king had not ceased to indulge in, even when De Ruyter 
 was advancing up the Thames; a thousand accusations, many 
 of them obviously absurd, found full credit with an oppressed 
 and irritated people. All the debates and all the proceedings 
 of the parliament during the two years filled with such dis- 
 astrous events, bear the impress of the agitation and distrust 
 which pervaded the national mind. The lower house, to 
 ensure the execution of the laws against the nonconformists, 
 
1668.] FIRE OF LONDON. 81 
 
 attempted to enact an oath, called the non-resistance oath, 
 which, in point of fact, involved neither more nor less than 
 the obligation upon all dissenters to abjure their belief. The 
 measure was only rejected by a majority of three. On the 
 occasion of the fire of London, the popular rumour which 
 attributed this catastrophe to a popish conspiracy received a 
 sort of confirmation from the solemn inquiry made into the 
 subject by the two houses. The inquiry ended in nothing; 
 yet parliament authorized the erection of a monument, bearing 
 an inscription which charged the conflagration upon the 
 papists; and again demanded from the king the promulgation 
 of an ordinance expelling all Jesuits and Romish priests from 
 the kingdom without delay. Lastly, proving more clearly 
 than anything else the degree of distrust in which the court 
 was held, the king having, on the appearance of Ruyter in 
 the Thames, hastily assembled an army of twelve thousand 
 men, the parliament, immediately that the danger had passed 
 off, required the instant dismissal of this force, and would 
 grant even the usual subsidies upon no other terms. 
 
 Such a multiplicity of blunders in the administration, in 
 the government, in the conduct of the war, in the external 
 negotiations affecting the honour of England, could not be 
 submitted to by a nation of late so powerful and so respected, 
 without the sacrifice of at least one victim to the general dis- 
 content. The spleen of all parties, accordingly, was directed 
 against the chancellor Clarendon; a circumstance that at first 
 may seem strange, after what has been said of his alliance 
 with the party which ruled the two houses, and appeared 
 predominant out of doors. But Clarendon having discoun- 
 tenanced the rupture with Holland, at a time when all 
 England desired it, the ill-conduct of a war, which he had 
 thus disapproved of, was made matter of reproach against 
 him, as if it had been the result rather of his secret ill-will to it, 
 than of a want of due ability. He had been endeavouring of late 
 to keep the balance between what people were again beginning 
 to call the court party and the national party; and the king, 
 by throwing upon him the responsibility of all that had been 
 done, gladly seized the opportunity thus afforded of emanci- 
 pating himself from the earl's troublesome austerity; while, 
 on the other hand, the parliament, in punishing him for 
 various^ acts wherein he had exhibited over complaisance 
 
 G 
 

 82 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1667- 
 
 towards the court, found occasion to send forth a general 
 reprobation of the waste of public money. Unluckily for his 
 reputation, Clarendon's private fortune had become largely 
 augmented since his accession to office; and, with the people, 
 this at once summed up and clearly confirmed every possible 
 imputation. 
 
 The king therefore thought he should be gratifying the 
 country, in common with himself, in announcing to it the 
 dismissal of the chancellor; parliament went farther than this, 
 and impeached the earl. It is perfectly easy, however, to see 
 from the terms of the impeachment itself, that the greater por- 
 tion of the grievances alleged against the disgraced minister 
 directly applied to the king himself. Each of its articles 
 was, so to speak, the protest of one or other of the classes 
 whom the restoration had already rendered discontented. 
 Thus, Clarendon was charged with having counselled the 
 king to levy an army for the purpose of ruling in an absolute 
 manner; with having said that the king was a papist; with 
 having caused the transportation of several persons in an 
 illegal manner; with having counselled the king to sell Dun- 
 kirk, and with having corruptly received a portion of the 
 purchase money; with having deprived most of the corpora- 
 tions of England of their charters ; with having betrayed the 
 king in the negotiations connected with the late w r ar; with 
 having counselled the division of the fleet, which had given 
 the victory to the Dutch; finally, with having authorized 
 various measures impeding the ordinary course of justice. 
 This latter accusation referred to various attempts of Claren- 
 don against the independence of grand and petty juries. The 
 trial by jury was one of those institutions which the English 
 had been the first to appreciate the importance of; the abso- 
 lute kings, from Henry VIII. downwards, had frequently 
 imposed fines upon grand and petty juries, in order to punish 
 them for verdicts counter to the views of power: the revolu- 
 tion had destroyed this abuse; Clarendon revived it. Upon 
 several prosecutions of officers charged by the government 
 with some conspiracy or other, jurcrs, under his direction, 
 had been reprimanded or fined for verdicts of acquittal pro- 
 nounced according to their conscience and their oath, and the 
 institution was now fettered. 
 
 Clarendon met the impeachment with a long memorial;. 
 
1668.] 
 
 EXILE OF CLARENDON. 
 
 83 
 
 an altogether ill-judged composition, in that its aim more 
 especially was to convict each of the other parties of error; 
 the parliament accordingly denounced the production as li- 
 bellous, and adjudged Clarendon to exile, a sentence to which 
 he submitted in silence. The opinion universally prevalent 
 that he carried with him into banishment an enormous amount 
 of wealth, created against him throughout the nation a hatred 
 which was never extinguished. His friend, the lord trea- 
 surer Southampton, had died three months before this. In 
 the last privy council which his declining health enabled him 
 to attend, Southampton, finding himself called upon to defend 
 the absent Clarendon from the attacks of his colleagues, said: 
 " My lord Clarendon is a good protestant, and a good church- 
 man; so long as he remains in authority, so long will our 
 laws, our liberties, and our religion be free from danger; if 
 he be removed, I tremble for the consequences." 
 
 In the opinion of his brother princes, Charles committed 
 a great error in borrowing the aid of the house of commons 
 against Clarendon; he thus invested the house with that 
 power of impeaching ministers which deprived his successor 
 of the restoration, and occasioned future ministers, ever ex- 
 posed to the jurisdiction of parliament, to seek the concur- 
 rence of that assembly, even by sacrificing to it the interests 
 of the crown. 
 
 g2 
 
84 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1667- 
 
 ÎO tomlflioqqx* dd J v 
 
 o ni BfioimO lo oini 
 
 [8 obrushO lis &fl£ t iova" 
 
 [ difj-ol 9f(fj3tq6oofi boitât* 
 
 abn lisift *d3 ©HOTTER III. 
 
 oiq 9fJt .j89TT£ o* 889hswo 
 
 ift BfiB gnri sdT A- 
 
 MINISTRY OF THE CABAL. 
 
 9ijjqaib bio 9ifr nedw <no 
 
 Transition from the system of Clarendon to that of the libertines — Spirit 
 of the Cabal ministry, and of the parliamentary opposition — Secret 
 alliance between the Cabal avid the court of France — Plans of the Cabal 
 for the establishment of absolute power and of popery — War with 
 Holland— Views of the Cabal in declaring this war- — Charles II. pen- 
 sioned by Louis XIV. — The two houses of parliament insulted — Pro- 
 gress of the opposition — rThe presbyterians and the church-of-England 
 men come to an understanding — Revolution in Holland — The plans of 
 the Cabal frustrated— -The king compelled to recur to parliament — 
 Struggle between the opposition and the Cabal on the subject of the 
 Anglican test — The parliament carry the test — Defections from the 
 Cabal ministry-Its fall. J 
 
 evoTqrai oi io 9tairono9 ot to 
 
 It was in the eighth year of the reign of Charles II. that 
 the Anglican ministry fell. It had fulfilled all that its 
 principles permitted it to undertake in promotion of the 
 counter-revolution; now that this revolution required the 
 overthrow of the Anglican worship and the suppression 
 of the parliamentary opposition, it found itself under the 
 necessity of transferring its destinies to fresh hands. The 
 catholic party having as yet but a precarious and unavowed 
 existence, it was only men of reckless ambition, and alike 
 indifferent '■ to ail sects and all parties, who would consent 
 to become instrumental to the iniquitous object in view^. 
 Such men readily presented themselves in the libertine 
 throng who had long since collected around the king, and 
 whom the public denounced as the instigators of all his 
 misconduct; for when a nation has thrown the shield of in- 
 violability over the person of its monarch, its only resource, 
 when he misgoverns them or himself, is to allege that he is 
 misled by others. 
 
1668.] CHANGE OF MINISTRY. 85 
 
 The accession to power of Charles's pernicious favourites 
 did not immediately follow the disgrace of Clarendon. A 
 transition state was produced by the appointment of a sort of 
 mixed ministry, retaining the duke of Ormond in office, and 
 which the secretary of state, Trevor, and sir Orlando Bridg- 
 man, nominated chancellor, rendered acceptable to the people 
 by their skill and integrity of purpose. But their adminis- 
 tration was too brief and too powerless to arrest the progress 
 of the struggle now commenced. The king and the parlia- 
 ment had scarcely concurred in that mutual pledge of agree- 
 ment, the sacrifice of Clarendon, when the old dispute about 
 the nonconformists was resumed, on the occasion of a propo- 
 sition which seemed calculated to remove this deplorable 
 subject of debate. Lord chancellor Bridgman had under- 
 taken, in this laudable design, to lay before parliament, under 
 the title of the Comprehension Bill, a project for securing to 
 the presbyterians certain concessions which would enable 
 them to re-enter the bosom of the Anglican church, and to 
 the other nonconformists the free exercise of their worship. 
 The house of commons, looking upon this as a new decree in 
 favour of the papists, gave it a very cold reception ; the more 
 zealous of the opposition, indeed, unequivocally declared that 
 the real aim of the bill was not to conciliate or to improve 
 the position of the presby terian nonconformists, but to destroy 
 the supremacy of the Anglican church, and to raise the papist 
 heresy in its place. The house, influenced by these views, 
 and disregarding the protestations of good faith which the 
 king condescended to offer, passed a resolution that for the 
 future no member should desire to renew any such propo- 
 sition. 
 
 The court found itself equally mistaken in the expedient it 
 devised for procuring fresh subsidies; for, in transferring to 
 Clarendon the onus of all the past disorders, it had not re- 
 lieved itself from its daily augmenting embarrassments. This 
 expedient, which consisted in keeping the nation under 
 perpetual apprehension of war, and in impressing upon it 
 the consequent necessity of providing the government 
 with funds for the maintenance and extension of the 
 fleet, had just been aided, though with views thoroughly 
 honest and patriotic, by sir William Temple, the English 
 resident at Brussels, and negotiator of the treaty known as 
 
86 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1668- 
 
 The Triple Alliance. This treaty, which saved Spanish 
 Flanders from the young and victorious Louis XI V., by in- 
 terposing the combined and formidable mediation of Holland, 
 Sweden, and England, was very acceptable to the English 
 nation, as restoring to it somewhat of that lustre which it 
 had lost by the peace of Breda of the preceding year, and 
 the court calculated upon making its advantage of the popular 
 satisfaction in the shape of subsidies. Accordingly, its re- 
 newed demands for money, ushered in by a pompous exposi- 
 tion of the advantages of the treaty, were based upon the ne- 
 cessity of taking care that the mediation of England should be 
 respected. The house of commons, however, who became less 
 and less compliant as the opposition ranks grew stronger, in- 
 terposed difficulties, the discussion of which occupied two 
 whole sessions. They said, that before they granted funds 
 for new armaments, it was desirable that they should have 
 full information as to the expenditure of the sums which had 
 been voted for the maintenance of the last war. The king, 
 without directly condemning this new pretension, replied 
 through his ministers, that it was at all events immediately 
 essential to provide for the wants of the fleet, and that the 
 house might, if it pleased, appoint commissioners to raise taxes 
 in its name, and to regulate their various application. This 
 concession appeared an admission of that which the king 
 might have been expected to deny, even against evidence, 
 and the house forthwith nominated a committee to examine 
 the financial accounts of the war with Holland. 
 
 The investigation pursued by this committee was so 
 searching, and consequently so offensive to the court, that 
 the king felt himself impelled to oppose the authority of his 
 royal word to a multitude of revelations which tended to in- 
 volve him in discredit. At the opening of the second of the 
 two sessions, rendered memorable by this inquiry, he had the 
 audacity to affirm " that he had himself procured an exact 
 account of the expenditure of the various sums, and was satis- 
 fied that no portion of them whatever had been diverted to 
 irregular purposes; that, on the contrary, he had, in addition 
 to these subsidies, employed a large proportion of his own 
 ordinary revenue in the war, and contracted, further, a very 
 heavy debt upon his own credit for the same purpose." 
 This monstrous falsehood, from its very hardihood, discon- 
 
1670.] MACHINATIONS OF THE ROYAL FAVOURITES. 87 
 
 certed. many of those who had been determined to prosecute 
 the inquiry; the court also managed, in the course of the 
 session, to detach, that is to say, to corrupt some members 
 who, in this research, were moved rather by the animosity of 
 party spirit than by the zeal of patriotism. Finally, it ap- 
 peased the majority, by suddenly relaxing in its affection for 
 the nonconformists, and consenting to laws more rigorous 
 than ever against secret assemblies. By these various means 
 it obtained further supplies of money, and stopped further 
 inquiry. Yet still, despite these manœuvres, despite all ex- 
 planations that were made, despite the shameful complication 
 introduced into the accounts, it was ascertained that there 
 were 800.000/., an enormous sum for the time, the employ- 
 ment of which, now made known to the nation, it was impos- 
 sible to justify. Yet, with this stamp of infamy upon it, 
 royalty contrived still to exist for a long period, because of 
 that contradiction which, in monarchies thus constituted, at 
 once permits the examination of the acts of sovereignty, and 
 creates for sovereignty august crimes which no law can 
 reach. 
 
 Charles II., deeply irritated by the discredit which this 
 affair threw upon him, rejected no course, however extreme 
 or dishonourable, that seemed to him calculated to relieve 
 him from the annoying censorship of parliament; a de- 
 plorable resource, but the inevitable result of the want of 
 foresight exhibited in the restoration, and the system of cor- 
 ruption already bound up in so fatal a manner with the errors 
 of this first period. Had he shown any repugnance to dissimu- 
 lation, had he made any honourable effort to struggle against 
 the difficulties of his position, men would only have pitied 
 him; but his domestic life itself was given up to a multitude 
 of intrigues which further complicated his embarrassments as 
 king. The favourites who, in order to secure impunity for 
 their disorders, conspired in common for the subjection of the 
 nation, shared among themselves the work of these under- 
 hand practices, that continually brought into contact their 
 ambition or their avidity, which Charles II. made fruitless 
 attempts to gratify. Some, in order to please him, laboured 
 to destroy the influence of the duke of York, others to create 
 for the duke of Monmouth, his natural son, a future greatness 
 denied to his birth; these to furnish him with some device for 
 
88 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1669- 
 
 separating from a barren consort; those to effect, without 
 public scandal, his ruptures with the mistresses of w 7 hom he 
 was tired, or to involve other families in the dishonour of a 
 new choice. 
 
 In the course of the inquiry concerning the Dutch war, 
 and although the duke of Ormond and the chancellor Bridg- 
 man were not as yet officially displaced, all the functions of 
 the government passed into the hands of five of the principal 
 favourites. Ashley Cooper, created earl of Shaftesbury, 
 Arlington, Buckingham, Lauderdale, took possession of the 
 various offices even before they were invested with their 
 titles: Lord Clifford, the only one among them whom we 
 have not yet had occasion to notice, was joined with them, 
 through the influence of the duke of York, and received the 
 treasury. Clifford, secretly a catholic, was generally more 
 esteemed than his colleagues, but led by his religious senti- 
 ments and a violent and domineering character to desire the 
 ruin of national liberties, he was not by any means displaced 
 among them. It happened that the word cabal, formed by 
 the initial letters of the names of the five new ministers, 
 closely characterized this alliance of turbulent men, and of 
 ambitions so various in their nature; and the designation, The 
 Cabal Ministry, which was given to it by the people, has 
 remained in history to recal, in the counter-revolutionary 
 government of the Stuarts, an epoch abounding in public 
 crimes. 
 
 At the period when this ministry was formed, the foreign 
 policy of England was still regulated by the principles of the 
 treaty of triple alliance directed against the aggrandizement 
 of France. Yet at this very period Louis XIV. acquired a de- 
 cided influence in the counsels of Charles II. The duke of 
 York, in his Memoirs, drawn up with an inflexibility of pre- 
 judice, and a want of judgment which supply in them the 
 place of good faith, relates, with perfect candour, and as if 
 nothing could have been more honourable, the secret trans- 
 actions which secured this influence, and obliged Charles, 
 transcending even the system which the new ministers ven- 
 tured to avow, to take occult and still more dishonourable 
 steps. 
 
 In the year 1669, the duke of York, tired of externally 
 practising the religion of the church of England, had sent for 
 
1670.] TREATY WITH FRANCE. 89 
 
 a Jesuit of high reputation, father Simons, and had inquired of 
 him the means of becoming reconciled with the church of 
 Rome. The Jesuit having declared that he could only do so 
 by renouncing the communion of the church of England, he 
 had resolved to quit a state at once, as he said, so perilous and 
 so painful. He had consequently written to the pope; and 
 the answer of his holiness having confirmed him in his views, 
 he determined to sound those of the king, and had made 
 overtures to him by lord Clifford. 
 
 As may be seen by the date of the conversion of the duke 
 of York, the king, at the moment when these overtures were 
 made to him, was in the height of the embarrassments occa- 
 sioned by the inquiries of the committee of accounts. He 
 seemed himself greatly inclined towards popery, and, accord- 
 ing to the duke's statement, expressed a desire to confer 
 secretly with him upon the subject. The conference took 
 place; Clifford, Arlington, and lord Arundel of Wardour 
 were summoned to it. When they were assembled, the king 
 complained of the church of England; said that he was 
 determined to favour throughout the realm the progress of 
 the Roman-catholic religion; that he believed in that re- 
 ligion; that he suffered much affliction from the restraint 
 which prevented his publicly professing it; and that he had 
 assembled them to obtain their advice as to the best time for 
 declaring his belief. He added, that he expected to en- 
 counter great and numerous difficulties, and that he wished 
 to expedite matters while he and his brother were still young, 
 and had the strength necessary for accomplishing so vast a 
 design. " He said this," says the duke of York, " with much 
 earnestness, even with tears in his eyes." 
 
 The result of the conference was, that the best mode of 
 bringing the enterprise to a successful issue would be to 
 labour at it in concert with the king of France. His ambas- 
 sador in London was taken into the secret, while lord Arundel 
 was sent to Paris to negotiate a treaty, which was concluded 
 in the beginning of 1670. By this treaty — still following the 
 duke of York's account — the king of France engaged to con- 
 tribute 200,000/. per annum towards the establishment of the 
 catholic religion in England; and this religion once esta- 
 blished, England and France were to unite in a war against 
 the Dutch republic. The partition of this republic between 
 
90 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1670- 
 
 the allied powers was arranged beforehand. But, first of ail, 
 it was necessary to set up the catholic religion in England — 
 a very easy task, according to the duke of York; and were it 
 not inconsistent with the gravity of history, we might cite 
 here some of the infallible means which he boasts of having 
 counselled, and which he regrets were not adopted. 
 
 Charles received the first quarter of his pension, and then, 
 with his confidants, proceeded, in profound secrecy, to provide 
 the more important fortresses of the kingdom with com- 
 manders upon whom they could rely; and various movements 
 of troops were made, for which the conditions of the triple 
 alliance served as a pretext. The navy was devoted to the 
 duke of York, or, at all events, placed under his influence as 
 high-admiral. The few troops then on foot were well dis- 
 posed; the officers, as in all standing armies, were men ready 
 to serve the crown, without asking any reasons for the orders 
 given to them. And this was nearly all that could be reckoned 
 upon to promote the project of the religious revolution. The 
 hopes founded by the court upon the supposed fact that a 
 large proportion of those who called themselves members of 
 the church of England cared no more for one religion than 
 for another, were equally absurd with those which rested on 
 the general effect of the persecutions of the nonconformists. 
 Those who, in defence of liberty, had attached themselves to 
 the English church, too thoroughly appreciated the importance 
 of that post to be indifferent as to its preservation; and with 
 regard to the sectaries who braved the laws of the church, 
 they only hated episcopacy as an off-shoot of popery. This 
 policy, therefore, which the duke of York avows in his 
 Memoirs with such a ridiculous assumption of high ability, 
 was as feeble as it was nefarious. " The rigorous partisans 
 of the church of England," says he, " were permitted to per- 
 secute the nonconformists at their discretion. They were 
 even encouraged in this, the better to make the latter appre- 
 ciate the relief they would derive from the triumph of the 
 catholics." 
 
 In the terms of the first convention between Louis XIV. 
 and Charles, war was not to be declared against the Dutch 
 republic until after the overthrow of the church of England. 
 Charles, having soon dissipated the money given by France 
 in aid of this latter enterprise, felt very much disposed to 
 
1671.] NEW TREATY WITH FRANCE. 91 
 
 acknowledge the difficulties which it presented, and to meet 
 the wishes of his ally, who desired, in the first place, to make 
 war upon the United Provinces. Arlington and Clifford 
 concurred in this view; the duke of York alone remained 
 faithful to the project of first of all converting England. From 
 this moment he kept himself apart, considering his brother 
 as the dupe of the instigations of Shaftesbury and of Bucking- 
 ham, who, not having been admitted into the secret, but 
 partly divining it, had been agitating to secure a share in the 
 negotiations with France, in order to direct them according 
 to their own views. Charles, decided upon postponing the 
 establishment of Catholicism, and being thus in a position to 
 avow to these two men the project of the war against Holland, 
 did not think it advisable to deprive himself of their talents 
 in the mysterious preparations which remained to be made. 
 The alliance was agreed upon, but not arranged in its details. 
 The duchess of Orleans, sister of Charles II., regarded, even 
 at this brilliant period of the fortunes of Louis XIV., as the 
 most distinguished woman of his court, came to England 
 under the pretext of seeing her brother, by whom she was 
 tenderly beloved, but charged by the king of France with 
 instructions relative to the war. Aided by Buckingham, the 
 duchess brought over the whole of Charles's council to the 
 views of Louis XIY. A few months after her return to 
 France she died by poison, the treaty not being yet defini- 
 tively concluded. This death, which was attributed to the 
 jealous suspicions of the duke her husband, furnished a means 
 of continuing the negotiation. The marshal de Bellefonds 
 came from France to offer condolence to the king of England. 
 The duke of Buckingham was sent to Paris under the pretext 
 of reciprocating the condolence, but in reality to conclude the 
 treaty; and it was forthwith arranged that the two kings 
 should each furnish a certain number of vessels; that 1,500,000 
 French livres should be paid over to Charles, so that he might 
 prepare his armaments without having recourse to his parlia- 
 ment; and that, in the spring of 1672, the allies should open 
 the campaign. 
 
 Although Charles might seem impelled to the immediate 
 undertaking of this war by the ascendancy of Louis, the war 
 in reality concerned his interests far more than those of the 
 French monarch. It was required by the disquietude of the 
 
92 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1670- 
 
 absolutest libertines, who were now conducting the counter- 
 revolution, as the war of 1664 had been demanded by the 
 passions of the Anglican party. The latter had armed 
 against Holland to prevent it from giving an asylum and 
 assistance to the presbyterians. Royalty had now to fear 
 lest this same Anglican party, menaced in its turn, should 
 seek the support of a republic, now become the common focus 
 of all the protestant sects, for such was the part played by 
 Holland at this period. It had attained this high degree of 
 importance by a series of events so closely connected with 
 those which, in England, had overthrown and then again 
 raised up monarchy, that it is impossible to arrive at their 
 final consequences, without recalling them, at least in a sum- 
 mary manner. 
 
 The reader is supposed to be acquainted with the principal 
 circumstances of the memorable struggle which, in the latter 
 half of the sixteenth century, emancipated the Netherlands 
 from papal tyranny and from the odious yoke of Philip II. 
 The results of this political and religious revolution having 
 been consolidated by the union of the Spanish provinces into 
 a nation, and their organization into a republic, under the 
 name of the United Provinces, an ancient form of magis- 
 tracy, the stadtholdership, had been invested, under the super- 
 intendence of an assembly composed of provincial deputies, 
 with the most important attributes of the executive power. 
 Under the princes of the house of Orange, successively 
 elected by the states, this magistracy had become menacing 
 to the liberty of the Dutch; and William II., who filled it at 
 the time when England was governed by Cromwell, having 
 sought to render it hereditary in his family, the states at his 
 death had excluded the house of Orange from the stadt- 
 holdership, and subsequently had abolished the office alto- 
 gether. The struggle between the ambitious pretensions of 
 the princes of Orange and the spirit of liberty which animated 
 the Dutch nation, had been very energetic, and at times very 
 sanguinary; throughout its duration, there had been an 
 alliance of interests between the Dutch republican party and 
 the revolutionary party in England, and between the de- 
 throned Stuarts and the house of Orange, excluded from 
 the stadtholdership, now represented by a young son of 
 William II., maternal grandson of Charles I. The mother 
 
1671.] AFFAIRS OF HOLLAND. 93 
 
 and grandmother of this child had contributed to the resto- 
 ration of Charles II., by lending him considerable sums where- 
 with to operate against the English republicans; and Charles, 
 since his restoration, as well as the inextricable embarrass- 
 ments of his position w r ould admit, had assisted his nephew 
 against the party which governed Holland, at the head of 
 which was placed, under the title of grand pensionary, John 
 de Witt, a former minister of William II. John de Witt, 
 whose noble life will ever give the lie to the sophists who 
 represent virtue as incompatible with a genius for conducting 
 public affairs, had not been able to destroy the ancient popu- 
 larity of the house of Orange, by surpassing, with his immense 
 services and his great actions, all the remarkable men it had 
 ever produced. The commercial prosperity of Holland, the 
 vigorous and patriotic administration which had given, it 
 such tranquillity at home, and such power abroad, the triumph 
 of the first war against Charles II., the glorious peace of 
 Breda, the triple alliance, were all his work. John de Witt, 
 forcibly impressed with the fear that the return of the stadt- 
 holdership would destroy the liberty of his country, and 
 witnessing as he did what royalty was doing in England 
 under the Cabal ministry, originated, in order to maintain the 
 republican system, measures, which unhappily too nearly re- 
 sembled persecution, against the Orange party, and thus 
 interested the nation in a young prince who presented him- 
 self with every promise of brilliant qualities. John de Witt, 
 aware that the king of England was intriguing against him 
 in favour of his nephew, was, on his part, endeavouring, by 
 his connexions with the chiefs of the parliamentary opposi- 
 tion, to involve the king in still greater embarrassments. 
 Thus, desirous as he was at once of reinstating in power 
 the family of an ancient ally, and of himself benefiting by 
 the elevation of his nephew, of depriving parliament of a 
 powerful auxiliary, and the nation of the example of a happy 
 and powerful republic, Charles was even more interested 
 than Louis XIV., a monarch without dispute, in the over- 
 throw of John de Witt, and, if it were possible, in the dis- 
 memberment of the Dutch union. 
 
 The conditions of the enterprise were not arranged between 
 the two kings until the commencement of 1671, though the 
 negotiations had been on foot ever since the end of 1669, the 
 
94 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1671- 
 
 epoch of the first steps which were taken in the matter by 
 the duke of York. While this plot was being woven against 
 the liberty of Holland, and, as an inevitable consequence, 
 against that of England, the ostensible conduct of the Cabal 
 ministry was destined to deceive parliament and the nation. 
 The secret but confused designs, the hesitating ambition of 
 royalty during the ten preceding years, had resolved them- 
 selves into a formidable system of deception, from which, 
 however, the veil was ever and anon torn by the weaknesses 
 and passions of Charles II. 
 
 There is no doubt but that, in professing, in his famous 
 interview with the duke of York, to be seized with so ardent a 
 zeal for Catholicism, and in protesting, with tears, his attach- 
 ment to that religion, Charles stooped to the most despicable 
 dissimulation. No return to religious sentiments had then 
 been manifested by his conduct. Yice reigned in his court 
 boldly and unblushingly than ever; his debaucheries were 
 more public, were notorious, and at times exposed him, when 
 prosecuting them under some ignoble disguise, to the insults 
 of the lowest populace. He took still less care to conceal his 
 scandalous immoralities, when he thought himself secure of the 
 assistance of Louis XIV., and for the most part, cast off the 
 restraints which he had at first imposed upon himself in order 
 not absolutely to outrage the religious and political attach- 
 ments of the nation. The regular assembling of parliament 
 was exceedingly annoying to him, but he could not dispense 
 with it, so exorbitant were the incessant exactions of his mis- 
 tresses. He retained it, therefore, and sought only to corrupt 
 it; a business in which Clifford, the treasurer, employed him- 
 self with considerable success, especially in the lower house. 
 Many of the members sold their votes upon all the most im- 
 portant debates. They had formed a code of morality accord- 
 ing to their wants, and manoeuvred between the court party 
 and that of the nation, upon certain fixed principles which 
 they did not hesitate to avow. They did not grant too much 
 money to the king at a time, so that, as they said, he might 
 the oftener have need of them ; they, however, took care to 
 give him enough wherewith to pay their pensions. When 
 their constituents complained of them, they answered that it 
 was necessary to conciliate the king in order to attach him 
 to national independence and the Anglican religion, and re- 
 
67 2.] 
 
 MANŒUVRES OF THE KING. 
 
 95 
 
 markably enough, so fully were they impressed with the ne- 
 cessity of going along with the public opinion on this latter 
 point, that, in reference to it, the court could absolutely do 
 nothing with them. The very men who sold their votes to 
 carry grants of money or arbitrary measures, refused them 
 upon all propositions favourable to the papists. 
 
 When already far advanced in the negotiations with France, 
 Charles demanded subsidies of parliament. His ministers 
 urged the powerful increase of the French navy, now three 
 times more numerous than before the last war, and the ne- 
 cessity of fitting out a fleet of sixty sail to maintain the en- 
 gagements of the triple alliance. The house of commons, led 
 away by its attachment to the diplomatic productions of sir 
 William Temple, exhibited such liberality on the occasion, 
 that the upper house, on the solicitation of the merchants 
 of London, thought it necessary to protest against this extreme 
 docility, and to oppose the imposition of the new taxes; and they 
 were ultimately abandoned. The resistance, contrary to custom, 
 proceeding this time from the upper house, the king resolved 
 to be present in future at the debates in that house, and soon 
 made its sittings a favourite pastime; finding more amuse- 
 ment, he said, in the excitement of their discussions than in a 
 stage farce. Hitherto, kings had only appeared at the sittings, 
 seated on their throne, and this merely at the opening of the 
 sessions, or on important occasions. Charles, under the pre- 
 tence of not throwing any restraint upon their lordships by 
 such an observance of his dignity, used to take his seat by the 
 side of the fire, and collecting around him the members of his 
 party, laugh, and talk noisily with them, which soon threw 
 the house into confusion. As his conversation was not with- 
 out a charm, and as, even when he questioned men with 
 authoritjr, there was an easy and winning good-nature about 
 his manner, he made use of this advantage to gain over the op- 
 position members. He saw at once what he could do with a 
 man, and pronounced with very little hesitation and with to- 
 lerable certainty, — That's a stiff, crabbed fellow; I shall make 
 nothing of him; or, This man has no conscience; I will give 
 him one after my own pattern. 
 
 Still, the reserve inspired by his presence, and by the fear 
 of the raillery of the courtiers, was not such as entirely to 
 reduce the opposition members to silence. Many, on the 
 
96 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1671- 
 
 contrary, infused more bitterness into their complaints against 
 his ministers, and repeated certain truths with regard to his 
 government all the more frequently, that he might have the 
 annoyance of hearing them. It was, in fact, impossible but 
 that, in seeking to turn into ridicule the parliamentary forms 
 which circumscribed the opposition members, Charles would 
 provoke a marked resentment, and expose his person to 
 attacks which had never before been ventured upon, and 
 which it was as dangerous to endure as to punish. This 
 tendency was manifested in the house of commons at the 
 commencement of 1671. The opposition having proposed 
 to lay a tax upon theatres, the court party objected, that 
 the actors being in the service of the king and serving 
 his pleasures, could not be taxed. A member, sir John 
 Coventry, asked whether it was the actors or the actresses 
 who served the pleasures of the king? and as Charles had at 
 the time two actresses among his mistresses, the daring 
 pleasantry of Coventry was received with shouts of laughter. 
 The jest excited the .greatest indignation at court. The 
 duke of York, not sorry for the lesson thus given to his 
 brother, urged that no notice should be taken of the affront; 
 but Charles resolved to revenge himself in such a manner, 
 that Coventry should never forget it. Some soldiers, posted 
 by the duke of Monmouth near Coventry's residence, were 
 ordered to seize him, and to inflict an infamous mutilation 
 upon him; sir John, attacked at night by these ruffians, 
 drew, and intrepidly defended himself; but after wounding 
 several of them, he was overcome by numbers, and the 
 soldiers slit his nose to the bone. This disgraceful treatment, 
 justly denounced as murderous by the house of commons, 
 produced a most menacing excitement among the people. 
 Coventry was spoken of as a martyr; the progress of his 
 recovery was watched, day by day, and the scar which 
 remained on his face was afterwards a mark of honour. 
 The house brought in a bill, which made mutilation a 
 capital crime, condemned the assailants of Coventry to trans- 
 portation, and expressly stipulated that the king should 
 not in their case be permitted to exercise his prerogative 
 of pardon. 
 
 Some time after this, a ruffian, named Blood, hired by 
 Buckingham to assassinate the old duke of Ormond, having 
 
1672.] THE DUKE OF YORK PROFESSES CATHOLICISM. 97 
 
 failed to effect his purpose, was tried, and being condemned, 
 received the king's pardon. The unaccountable protection 
 granted by Charles to this man, who afterwards appeared at 
 court, decorated with orders, in receipt of a pension, and 
 in high credit, was interpreted in the most unfavourable 
 manner, and gave rise, in the presence of the whole court, 
 to a scene very offensive to Charles. The son of the old 
 duke, (the earl of Ossory,) soon afterwards, seeing the duke 
 of Buckingham standing by the king, could not contain 
 himself, and addressed him thus: " My lord of Buckingham, 
 I know well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt of 
 Blood's upon my father; and therefore I give you fair warn- 
 ing, that if my father comes to a violent end by sword or 
 pistol; if he dies by the hand of a ruffian, or by the more 
 secret way of poison, I shall not be at a loss to know the 
 first author of it; I shall consider you as the assassin; I shall 
 treat you as such; and wherever I meet you I shall pistol 
 you, though you should stand behind the king's chair. And I 
 tell it you now in his majesty's presence, that you may be 
 sure I shall keep my word." No one spoke a word; Buck- 
 ingham and the king himself kept silence. It was impossible 
 ' to brave either of them more daringly. 
 
 I only call the attention to these circumstances, as exhibiting 
 to what a degree Charles contemned public opinion. The 
 duke of York, who had more respect for it, without, however, 
 acknowledging it as a judge of his conduct, drew upon him- 
 self, by an ill-judged manifestation of his zeal for Catholicism, 
 the explosion of a discontent which was at liberty to give 
 itself free vent against this hostile sect. His wife abjuring, 
 on her death-bed, the doctrines of the church of England, 
 and receiving the sacraments of the Romish church, he re- 
 garded her death and its circumstances as a warning from 
 Heaven, and, thinking he could not any further delay publicly 
 to announce his own conversion, he declared himself a catholic. 
 Although it had long been known that he had an inclination 
 for this religion, the step he now took created an outcry, as 
 though it were necessarily connected with a formidable con- 
 spiracy against the church of England. And such a danger 
 did exist, at all events in the intentions of the king, of his 
 brother, and of some of the ministers; the nation doubtless 
 exaggerated it, precisely because it was hidden; but these 
 
 H 
 
98 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1671- 
 
 terrors of popery, which accused the duke of York with 
 such vehemence, had a foundation; and therefore, since the 
 suspected conspiracy was real and continuous, it was for- 
 tunate for England that the political resistance was supported 
 by an impassioned and energetic sentiment, capable of being 
 misled for awhile, but incapable of being laid asleep. 
 
 The acts which might seem to belong more especially to 
 the ministry, fully concurred with those which emanated 
 from the peculiar character of the two princes, in rang- 
 ing justice and reason on the side of resistance. As the 
 year 1672, appointed for the commencement of hostilities 
 against Holland, approached, the government felt that it 
 needed a somewhat extended prorogation of parliament, in 
 order not to be impeded by it in preparations which the 
 pretext of the triple alliance could not entirely cover. 
 It was therefore no longer convoked. The ministry em- 
 ployed the interim in essaying arbitrary measures, and made 
 rapid progress in this direction. In the first place, a financial 
 conception, worthy the genius of Shaftesbury, procured 
 for the king that money which the prorogation of par- 
 liament would that year deprive him of. It consisted in 
 closing the exchequer; that is to say, in refusing to repay the 
 bankers the sums they had, as usual, advanced to the trea- 
 sury, in anticipation of the parliamentary subsidies. The 
 bankruptcy of the treasury obliged the bankers themselves to 
 fail in their engagements, and produced a long cessation of 
 business. The Navigation Act, established by Cromwell for 
 the benefit of English commerce, was suspended, and the 
 king's mere will given as the reason for this proceeding; 
 martial law, which had ceased to remain in force under 
 Charles I., was re-established; the government took into its 
 own hands the monopoly of certain articles of commerce; all 
 these strokes of authority followed closely upon one another 
 within a few months. Some of them, unimportant in them- 
 selves, were intended rather to establish the principle of ab- 
 solute sovereignty, than to produce any immediate advantages 
 of consequence. The king, at length, went so far as to sus- 
 pend, of his own personal authority, all the penal laws against 
 the papists and nonconformists. The former were hence- 
 forward permitted to practise their worship in their own 
 houses; the latter might hold open meetings, after having 
 
1672.] WAR DECLARED AGAINST HOLLAND. 99 
 
 provided themselves with letters of licence. The ministry 
 undertook to prove that this measure was popular, and for 
 that purpose caused money to be given to some of the pres- 
 byterians, who signed addresses of thanks, disavowed by the 
 large mass of the nonconformists. At the same time, the mem- 
 bers of the church of England protested with the most daring 
 energy; their ministers declaimed from the pulpits against 
 the imminent invasion of popery. Orders were given them 
 by the bishops to instruct the people in all the points of reli- 
 gious controversy which separated the English from the 
 Romish church. The duke of York was personally referred 
 to in several sermons. The king wished to silence the pulpits, 
 which were again becoming political tribunes, but it was re- 
 presented to him that it would but little become him to per- 
 secute the defenders of a creed which he himself professed; 
 but stilly tyrannical laws being necessary to sustain arbitrary 
 measures, he published a proclamation, menacing with the 
 most rigorous penalties those who should speak disrespect- 
 fully of his acts, or who, hearing others speak disrespectfully 
 of them, should not immediately give information thereof to 
 the magistrates. 
 
 Meanwhile, the ministers sought, by provoking Holland, to 
 force it to remonstrances which might give grounds for a 
 rupture; but that country being prepared to make great 
 sacrifices in order to maintain the triple alliance, these provo- 
 cations failed in their aim. The government of Charles II., 
 reduced to violate the law of nations in order to obtain war, 
 no longer hesitated. A fleet of merchantmen returning richly 
 laden from Smyrna, was attacked in the Downs by an English 
 squadron, much more numerous than that which formed the 
 Dutch escort. The merchantmen escaped without any mate- 
 rial loss, and Charles, who had reckoned upon deriving a 
 large sum of money from the anticipated capture, obtained 
 by the outrage only the melancholy advantage of being able 
 to keep the promise he had made to Louis XIV. His de- 
 claration of war against Holland, issued in March, 1672, in 
 order to make the war a national one, set forth all sorts of 
 imaginary grievances. That of Louis XIV. was far more 
 ingenuous. The insolent monarch simply proposed to show 
 the Dutch republic that he disliked it, and that his glory re- 
 quired him to make war upon it. 
 
 h2 
 
100 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1672- 
 
 The forces displayed at the same time, on land and sea, by 
 Louis and Charles, were answerable to the degree ôf import- 
 ance which the two aliuM attached itoxdieùdestecuctiiiHa of the 
 Dutch republic; thmwoesfbrutthsa .-promo&xàr éélhisBqpkns of 
 aggrandizement, the other far- the accomplislimefttntif his 
 prey ect s of absolute domination.; It has x bash 1 iritiiiiated, in 
 speaking of >ijib> : i brmatie» ; t£ rthàé .league ,abfit>tee®iithee two 
 kings, which, in the ..outset, was kept wholly secret,- ifchafc 
 Charles and Xfouiaojrro-pdsétoL» tooassigifcjfo ïbeiyotag- prince of 
 Orange, aftefr dviarthr.oivpg^^ieicDirrcli rejaifclie; bufcj&ogmall 
 portion of (the t^r»t^3&wM<l&djh-^ 
 
 they were to .divid&v\be^weeia^t^m.sv^î&Stl1fe8 yhopeû itfcffl 
 within a- yeai^fkej wefii . wQtdd-=bede*minaMd-^ IdnêéfoaùAàMh, i îke 
 acquisitioriof a.paaf t of Hollaadi wbulftiîedestablislïi Ms fiiranjaes, 
 and thus enable him to govern without the/ cmffirmnmbot 
 parliament, and to promotes iau ireligicta >irt« i accordance! with-: im 
 views.:. He was on the point of seeing a rJortioni of .-his hopes 
 realized. The duke of York was not veiîpduccessfîul^ sea 
 against Ruy ter; but Louis; marching in the- ti-aiii of a fork 
 midable army, commanded by Turenne and the prince de 
 Condé, obtained such marked triumphs, that the: States; very 
 soon after the commencement of the campaign, found* them- 
 selves compelled to solicit peace. Although the pensionary, 
 John de Witt, had done, in this dangerous crisis, all that 
 man could do, popular discontent attributed to him the mis- 
 fortunes of a war, which he had, it was said> provoked by the 
 pertinacious exhibition of his ultra-republican principles. In 
 spite of all he could urge to the contrary, the prince of 
 Orange, then twenty-two years of age, was placed at the head 
 of an army, and at a time when every one despaired of the 
 salvation of the country, made himself conspicuous j iï*om the 
 first, by that most valuable of military qualities, the calm 
 vigour of mind which the experience of danger does not 
 always bring with it. Nothing more was «needed ; to recal to 
 the nation all the merits of a family which i Had i so >kmg> been 
 dear to it, and to give triumph to the Orange JpaÉtji.. De 
 Witt, who was/represented da* hiwing too deeply aiifcurrfed-iitlie 
 hostility of the two kings not to be a lasting obstacle to peace, 
 became, in a few months, an object of hatred to the more 
 timid of the people; and unhappily, instead of that considera- 
 tion which it is, perhaps, necessary to show towards errors 
 
1673. J MURDER OF THE DE WITTS. 101 
 
 inseparable from human frailty*, he gave way to a pro- 
 found sentiment» of scorn for his fellow citizens; and thence- 
 forth separated tkear- cause from his own. 
 
 John -de Witibuhad a brother who <\ had 1 long shared public 
 favoui?»withi liim^JanoV like hiiB^jhadj-nlerited it by great ser- 
 vices, rare talents, and liobMîvktues. Cornelius de Witt was 
 accused f by sorile; \ miscreant vof r haivi<ng attempted to procure 
 the assas sination ôf éher/prinoe of Orange. He was put to 
 theitortnrd tdïàm]ae mmi'cionf'ess^iplot whieh did not exist. 
 Amidst ihisstorribte -iajgonyy. (Dotaeiiusv reflated «Otoe stanzas 
 from the;ode sfivEeortem actmaeemtprèposith virum. &c, which 
 well illustrated - his firmness of souL His judges, unable to 
 condemn s Mo% i î éontentejd - thehiaelvefel with banishing him . 
 John de Witt p who, meantime,^ ka&oresignekl his office of pen- 
 siobàryv haviiigoGome^io ihis brother in prison to accompany 
 him into eàrilep both, were attacked by a furious populace, at 
 the head of whom >werei some Orange chiefs. To say that 
 they wBreiimassaéredy that their bodies were cut in pieces, is 
 to confess that patriotismi would be a poor virtue were it 
 only to be^apjke&iated by the multitude, such as ignorance 
 and supeirstltionjhayeimadé' 'thatrmultitiicl6;no'; sdl 
 
 The death of these tw/o great men was followed in Tlolland 
 by a violent re^aetiQnrihgairi$tiiil^:ii^pdblican party. The 
 nation iwenti; so' far in' the abandonment of the principles to 
 which it had'^Wfediits splendohrfithfttifeirl^ie prince of Orange 
 toi havëpatoineid ^iïh'e ^sovereignty, : there was wanting but 
 Ms jcoiisept'/to .then advances made ! to' him; But naturally 
 eaatïous} Jhe^maJSTfEusted . the popular ebullitions so favour- 
 able to idnq s and- 1 1 contented -Himself! î with the stadtholder- 
 ^i^ni«>Whileuaiiq-jentir ! e<fiEeTolution was- being effected in 
 the government^ while all : the ^magistracies were being 
 changed- rniifcbé' provinces not • in the -Occupation of Louis 
 XIV., ambassadors ^froim theui States nsoMicited *peace in 
 France and in England at the same time, and the prince of 
 Orange had full -power to accept or to reject the conditions 
 offered. It wàqjfértuaî ate ' fori Holland that William was not 
 a man to sacrifice national interests to those which Charles 
 and Louis endeavoured to impress upon him as common to 
 him with all crowned heads. The two victorious kings 
 endeavoured to associate him in the dismemberment of 
 Holland. They offered him the absolute sovereignty over 
 
102 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1672- 
 
 some of the provinces as a compensation for the loss of the 
 rest. Buckingham, who was sent to him, had hoped to inspire 
 him with a taste for the principles of his master, and to induce 
 him to trust the generosity of Louis, and the warm friendship 
 of the king his uncle. But all the resources of his mind were 
 ineffectual against the reserve of a young man, already versed 
 in dissimulation, who, while appearing to hesitate, gained 
 valuable time, and employed it with incredible activity in 
 strengthening the administration, and in restoring discipline to 
 an army which the fall of de Witt had disorganized. Buck- 
 ingham, perceiving at length that he was being tricked, 
 resolved to bring the matter to an end, and in a last interview 
 attempted to impose his conditions by violence of language 
 and demeanour; but the prince cut him short, by declaring 
 that his country had confided its fate to him, and that he 
 would not betray it for mere personal considerations. " Your 
 country," exclaimed Buckingham, " is at the mercy of my 
 master, and of the king of France: 'tis hopeless to think of 
 saving it," and he repeated several times, in a tone of affected 
 compassion : " Prince, do you not yourself perceive that 
 Holland is lost?" "I see," replied Y^illiam, "that it is in 
 great danger; but as to my seeing that it is lost, there is an 
 effectual means to prevent this, which is to die in the last 
 dyke. 
 
 After this energetic declaration, the prince had no alterna- 
 tive but to excite in the nation the same sentiment which the 
 « nation had aroused in him. He convoked an extraordinary 
 assembly, and opened it by himself explaining in detail the 
 state of affairs. He described the views of the allies, and to 
 prove that they were not in a position to enforce them, he 
 exhibited England distracted by the internal struggle between 
 the king and the parliament, and France exciting against 
 herself the enmity of all Europe, and, within her territories, 
 ground down by despotism and ruined by reckless expenditure. 
 Then comparing the resources of Holland with the force 
 which its enemies might bring into the field, he promised, if 
 all would support him, very shortly to infuse more caution 
 into an enemy who proportioned his demands to the opinion 
 which he had formed of the depression of his contemplated 
 victim. The entire assembly, says an historian, were, for a 
 while, in mute astonishment at hearing so young a man speak 
 
1673. J EMBARRASSED POSITION OF CHARLES II. 103 
 
 of all these things with so much knowledge and judgment: 
 presently there was hut one cry, to defend themselves to the 
 last extremity, and if the result were against them, to trans- 
 port themselves to the TVest Indies with all the wealth they 
 could carry with them. 
 
 All hope of forcing a disastrous peace upon Holland was 
 therefore lost to Charles; and as there was already gathering 
 in Germany against France the storm announced, and perhaps 
 raised by William, he now saw only in the distance those 
 brilliant chances which he had thought to realize in a single 
 campaign, and upon which he had so imprudently built up his 
 plan of despotism. He would then have fain brought back 
 matters between himself and the nation to the point from 
 which he had separated himself, by the whole space so rapidly 
 traversed by the Cabal ministry. But his projects were 
 now known to all England. His religion was suspected; 
 that of his brother declared. The many arbitrary acts of the 
 last two years, the contempt heaped upon the national repre- 
 sentation, a war undertaken without even plausible motives, 
 and carried on by means which were not avowed; the command 
 of the army given to the count Schomberg, a general from 
 France: the nomination of popish officers to the most impor- 
 tant posts; all these things manifested a fixed determination 
 to destroy at once the liberty and the religion of the country. 
 
 Meantime, a new convocation of parliament became essen- 
 tial. The war had exhausted all the resources. The Cabal, 
 violating one of the most ancient privileges of the commons, 
 devised the plan, in order to insure a majority in that house, 
 of itself despatching the writs of election in virtue of which 
 new members were to be called to the places vacant since the 
 last session. 
 
 Parliament opened in the beginning of 1673; the king, in 
 his speech, rapidly passed in review all that had been done 
 during the eighteen months of prorogation, giving perfectly 
 absurd explanations of some of the acts of which the nation 
 most loudly complained. For instance, as to the irregular 
 issue of the writs, he said, that the object had been to save 
 the house any loss of time; and the reason he alleged for the 
 delay in re-assembling parliament was, that it had been deemed 
 desirable to give the members an opportunity of attending to 
 their private affairs. He expressed himself more frankly 
 
104 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1673- 
 
 with regard to the ordinances in favour of the papists : lie 
 was resolved, he said, to maintain them, and would endure no 
 contradiction upon that point. Shaftesbury, who spoke next, 
 had it in charge to make the best explanations he could of the 
 war. After alleging, which was falée, that it was the pro- 
 
 that the august allies, knowing their true interests^ had 
 resolved to destroy a government hostile to all monarchies; 
 ti&Yfemmded- the^fetfftiiô^i^iM^hhfeyvfeà^ themselves called 
 for the first war, and that, consequently, the king had acted 
 in conformity with their probable wishes, he having no reason 
 to suppose them 'changed in this respect; that it was not 
 merely his 'Av^/rfl^»"*h#fa-^S&. ^In conclusion, attempting 
 to make ^ibfr ^ bad ,f ar^ranents by affected enthusiasms he 
 exclaimed, that this new Carthage must be destroyed; that 
 Delenda est Carthago must be the maxim of England, unless 
 she desired to see Holland attain the empire of the sëa§. ,; 
 
 The commons, acting Upon their old tactics of attacking 
 royalty only on its weak side, its affection for- popery, con- 
 tented themselves with the explanations given by the king 
 and Shaftesbury as to the political conduct of the govern- 
 ment during the prorogation. Their extreme moderation, 
 even with regard to the affair of the writs, defeated the 
 diversion which the ministry had endeavoured to effect by it 
 in favour of the toleration edict; and as the king had engaged 
 to support this edict with all the energy of which he was ca- 
 pable, the parliamentary opposition united all its forces to 
 compel him to revoke it. It began the fight by reverting to 
 a petition presented at the close of the last session by the two 
 houses, and in w r hich they had respectfully informed the 
 king that a great number t of priests and Jesuits frequented 
 the cities of London and AVestminster, and the various coun- 
 ties of the kingdom; that their number was constantly aug- 
 menting; that they had established societies even in St. 
 James's- palace; and that thence they spread themselves in all 
 directions, seeking to seduce the people, and to corrupt youth 
 by inspiring it with papistical principles. Those English or 
 foreign priests, said the signers of the petition, cause cate- 
 chisms and other heretical books to be sold at the very doors of 
 parliament; the magistrates take no heed to them; papists are 
 
1674.] MEASURES AGAINST THE PAPISTS. 105 
 
 even. permitted to enjoy places which they exercise in their 
 own persons, or by deputy; and although there have been 
 many prosecutions instituted against them in the court of 
 exchequer, they have never been dismissed or punished. 
 Now, added many members, since this petition was first pre- 
 sented, the audacity of the papists has increased still more; 
 and what has the king done to arrest the/progress of the 
 evil and to calm just alarm? Not only has- he not put in 
 force the laws against the nonconformists, but he has adopted 
 them, and- has, now lately declared, that in this respect he will 
 endure no contradiction: does he, then, » suppose that, a t his 
 will, he can change the constitution of the state,, ^nd despoil 
 parliament of its legislative attributes? Is it not enough that, 
 by his royal prerogative, he may, by pardoning the. guilty, 
 neutralize in a great measure the- laws which parliament has 
 made, and which the nation considers so essentia! to its 
 repose? This bold language was maintained in an address 
 voted almost unanimously, and in which the common s signi- 
 fied to the king their firm intention to enforce the laws 
 against the papists, and demanded the abrogation of the edict 
 of toleration. The address was immediately followed up by 
 the introduction of a bill, which declared papists incapable of 
 holding any kind of office, enjoined all public functionaries 
 henceforward to add to the oaths of supremacy and alle- 
 giance, a certificate that they had received the communion in 
 an Anglican church, and called upon them publicly to make 
 the following declaration:— " I, A. B., do declare that I do 
 believe there is not any transuhstantiation in the sacrament of 
 the Lord's Supper, at or after the consecration thereof, by any 
 person whatsoever." 
 
 However frivolous a proposition of this kind may appear 
 in itself, it is obvious how formidable the opposition would 
 render itself, if it succeeded in compelling all the secret ene- 
 mies which it had in the administration, the magistracy, the 
 navy, and the army, to a public profession of faith upon that 
 dogma, winch more strongly than any other marks the separa- 
 tion between popery and the various protestant sects. Accord- 
 ingly the adoption or the rejection of the bill was, at this period 
 of the struggle between the counter-revolution and English 
 liberty, an immense question, a question of life or death for 
 both these great interests. The court endeavoured to rally all 
 
106 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1673- 
 
 the nonconforming protestants against this motion, and at first 
 affected to oppose it only in their behalf; but as the most de- 
 cided provision in the bill, that which imposed the test, or 
 declaration of principles, with regard to tran substantiation, 
 was evidently not directed against them, this manœuvre did 
 not succeed; so far from it, indeed, the nonconforming pro- 
 testants themselves denounced the trick. Their conduct on 
 this occasion was very remarkable, and proved, what the 
 court had long refused to acknowledge, that the hatred of 
 popery, common to all protestant sects, had reconciled them 
 amongst each other, ever since the protection given to the 
 Jesuits and Eomish priests had revealed the sinister projects 
 on foot. One of the members for London, alderman Love, 
 well known for his attachment to presbyterian opinions, was 
 the first who repelled, for himself and for his co-religionists, 
 the hypocritical professions of interest made by the adversaries 
 of the bill. He said that before all things it was essential to 
 combat popery; that the test would openly brand all those 
 who secretly favoured that dangerous heresy; that several 
 provisions of the bill were, indeed, very vexatious to those 
 who, like himself, were of the presbyterian church, but that, 
 pending the attainment of more favourable terms, he declared, 
 in their name, that they w^ould prefer remaining exposed to 
 the severity of the laws of the church of England, than impede 
 them in their operation against the papists. Many members, 
 leaders of other protestant sects, supported the bill by similar 
 arguments, and this extraordinary disinterestedness so affected 
 the church of England members, that they introduced into 
 the bill a clause in favour of nonconforming protestants, and 
 the bill passed the house by a large majority. 
 
 There remained but one hope for the partisans of the edict 
 of toleration, that the upper house would reject the measure; 
 though, if a vote to this effect were obtained from the 
 house, force might be required to carry it out, so formidable 
 had the reconciliation brought about in the commons rendered 
 the opposition. But the confusion which a first defeat had 
 already created in the council of Charles, manifested itself in 
 this second experiment. Clifford, who made a personal affair of 
 the success of the edict, undertook to support it in the lords. 
 In a speech drawn up with the assistance of Charles IL, he 
 proceeded to such lengths against the lower house, as to speak 
 
1674.] DEFECTION OF SHAFTESBURY. 107 
 
 of it in insulting terms, and designated its Test Bill as mon- 
 strum horrendum, informe, îngens. But the astonishment 
 caused by the violence and disorder of his harangue, was 
 succeeded by far greater amazement, when Shaftesbury, 
 rising, and setting aside all oratorical precautions, declared 
 that his opinion of the conduct of the commons differed, toto 
 ccelo, from that of the lord treasurer; that the fidelity of that 
 house could not be doubted, and that he deferred to its judg- 
 ment upon the edict of toleration, as to a wise opinion given 
 by good servants, who fulfilled a duty in showing themselves 
 tenacious of the laws and religion of the land. The house 
 could scarcely believe that it was Shaftesbury who delivered 
 this strange speech, he who was well known to be the author 
 of the pernicious system which had been pursued since the 
 fall of Clarendon. The members looked at one another in 
 stupor, as if this new treachery of a man whom they had ever 
 known to anticipate the fall of the parties he had served, 
 revealed the existence of some great danger. They divided 
 amidst an unexampled agitation, and the bill was carried by 
 a very small majority. The minority, composed of the lords 
 most eminent for their talents and fortune, protested against 
 a decision alike surprising with all that had taken place in 
 this sitting. The duke of York, as he left the house, said to 
 the king, " What a knave of a chancellor have you there!" 
 " And you, brother," answered the king, "what a mad fool 
 of a treasurer have you given me I" 
 
 The conduct of Shaftesbury, as this reply would already 
 indicate, had produced upon Charles an impression which 
 was not that of indignation. The moment had at length 
 arrived for supporting injustice by force; and his aversion for 
 extreme measures, an aversion inspired, not by a horror of 
 blood, but from a want of courage, induced him to rely on the 
 sure quick-sightedness of him of his ministers whom he 
 esteemed the least, and whose mental depravity most resembled 
 his own. He gave an altogether ungracious reception to the 
 duke of York, Buckingham, Clifford, Lauderdale, and lord 
 Berkley, who urged him, for the sake of his glory and of his 
 dearest interests, to order the army of Schomberg into Lon- 
 don, and to expel the opposition from the two houses. In a 
 council which tumultously assembled after the sitting of the 
 upper house, he manifested no displeasure either at the auda- 
 
^ r- 2 
 
 108 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1673- 
 
 city with which Shaftesbury supported his new part, in the 
 presence of the colleagues whorn . lie had just betrayed, or at 
 the dexterity with which. Arlington went over to the opinion 
 of Shaftesbury. He after watcjs gave a cordial reception : [to 
 some niëmbers of the lower house who, at the instigation. of 
 these two ministers, came to assure him that the, speech of 
 Shaftesbury had counteracted^ in the public mind, the ill 
 effect produced by CUfford's ; that it was generally believed 
 that the former expressed the opinions of the king, and the 
 latter those of the duke of York; that the common^; tlaaf^w! 
 upon the obdurate portion of the ministry all the odium of 
 the papist edict, and thai jf his majesty would take upon him- 
 self /to revoke it, the house would immediately vote the sub- 
 sidies necessary for continuing the war. , Such was, in fact, 
 the disposition of the commons. 
 
 This mode of evasion was exactly suited to a man of 
 Charles's character. He sent for thp edict of toleration, .bcoJ£@j 
 the seal with his own hand, and intimated to £be common^) 
 that he consented to the Test Bilk The commons replied to 
 his gracious message by voting a subsidy of 12,000/., and , he, 
 on his part, formally assented to the Test Bill, which then be- 
 came law; after this, the parliament adjourned of its own 
 
 accola. r^.i ' on3 Sj ; ; 
 
 The whole' benefit of this compromise, made, to avert ex- 
 tremities alike dreaded by both parties, accrued to the nation. 
 The Test Act, which came into .operation at once, compelled 
 the duke of York to resign the office of lord high admiral, 
 Schomberg to retire from the command of the army,, the 
 papist officers to surrender their commissions, and Clifiord: to 
 quit the treasury. As to the Cabal ministry,, having lostin^ 
 the struggle the toleration bill, the only weapon w r ith .which, 
 it opposed the commons, it could neither alter its course, nor 
 contend against the general indignation which cried aloud for 
 its dissolution. The failure of a second campaign .- against 
 Holland having compelled the king to recal the parliament at 
 the close of 1673, the first proposition made in the commons 
 was for the impeachment of the ministers. The opposition 
 vehemently recurred to all the grievances which, in the last 
 session, they had consented to waive for the sake of procuring 
 the passing of the test act; more especially they attacked the 
 principle of the current war against Holland, a war, they 
 
1674.1 MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF YORK. 109 
 
 said, at once unjust in itself and ruinous to the country; a 
 war which placed England at the mercy of the "king of 
 France, and menaced her internal liberty by affording a pre- 
 text for keeping on foot troops and mijiti a illegally raised. 
 The king, to pacify them, announced that he was about to 
 open negotiations with the States, for the purpose of effecting 
 a peace which he himself desired as earnestly as Lany of his 
 àifb}4èts.J )i Èti;t ïtië IftuSe Wét r this ; . assurance with facts which 
 utterly belied them; among others with the negotiation which 
 they knew had been proceeding, under the auspices of 
 Louie l XI¥ f . n for the marriâge jJFthe duke of York with a 
 popish princess. Thé king, as to this, intimated that it was 
 too late to oppose the union, since the betrothal had already 
 taken "place. The commons broke out more warmly than 
 ever at this communication, arid Said that it would be per- 
 fectly easy to do that which the king described as impossible, 
 since it would suffice for the purpose to declare that the 
 princess would not be admitted into the kingdom, The dis- 
 cussion on the subject became so stormy and menacing, that 
 his majesty prorogued parliament, the commons separating 
 under solemn protest. ! « \ <• «, . 
 
 1 hey were recalled two months afterwards, in the beginning 
 of 1674. In the interim, the princess of Modena had arrived, 
 and her marriage with the duke of York been completed. The 
 commons, on the first day of their meeting, demanded a public 
 fast, an unequivocal and gloomy manifestation of their anxiety 
 respecting the fate of the menaced Anglican religion. It be- 
 came necessary to offer up to them the ministry as a pro- 
 pitiatory sacrifice. Shaftesbury had already made his peace 
 with the popular party, who had received him with the 
 welcome always accorded to deserters whose importance 
 serves as a shield for their tergiversation. Buckingham 
 would willingly, by following his example, have saved him- 
 self from impeachment, but the commons required from him 
 a public account of his conduct, and assailed him with humi- 
 liating reproaches. Shaken at first by the violence of these 
 attacks, he resumed courage upon the success of several 
 telling epigrams that fell from him in his replies to his 
 adversaries. In the course of this singular system of defence, 
 by means of a figure of speech, the audacity of which became 
 the subject of general remark, he threw upon the shoulders 
 
110 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1674- 
 
 of the king and his brother the burden of all that he himself 
 was charged with. " Hunting," said he, *' is pleasant sport 
 enough, but it won't do to hunt in company with a couple of 
 madmen, or you may chance get shot between them." The 
 king thoroughly appreciated the bitterness of this allusion: 
 and never saw his old favourite again. Lauderdale had also 
 made overtures to the opposition party, but was repelled as 
 too much an object of public odium and contempt to be worth 
 conciliating; and both he and Arlington were impeached. 
 When the king saw this fierce determination on the part of 
 the commons, he hastened to complete his negotiations with 
 Holland, and immediately, upon the conclusion of peace, pro- 
 rogued the parliament, contriving in this way to retain about 
 him two ministers whom he found still useful — Lauderdale, 
 from his thorough knowledge of the affairs of Scotland, then 
 in a most confused condition, and Arlington, as a man pecu- 
 liarly qualified for adapting to the secret projects which the 
 king could not make up his mind to relinquish, the system of 
 government rendered necessary by the public indignation 
 arising from so many ineffectual attempts to carry those 
 projects. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1675.] POLICY OF CHARLES II. Ill 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE PRESBYTERIAN OPPOSITION. 
 
 Policy of Charles II. — Danby's ministry — Plans of the new administration 
 — Arrangements between Charles II. and Louis XIV. — Pretended medi- 
 ation in favour of Holland — Efforts of the opposition against the papists 
 and against Louis XIV. — Desertions from the court party — Prepon- 
 derance of the presbyterians in the opposition — Charles II. obliged by 
 parliament to act in favour of Holland — Levy of thirty thousand men — 
 Diplomatic intrigues ; foreign -war ; parliamentary debates before the 
 peace of Nymegen — Popish conspiracy. 
 
 The separate peace concluded with Holland in the beginning 
 of 1674 was one of the necessities imposed upon Charles II. 
 by the defeat which he had experienced in the affair of the 
 test act. This peace consummated the ruin of the counter- 
 revolutionary resources conceived by the Cabal. The firm- 
 ness and talent of the prince of Orange having so happily 
 seconded the efforts of the parliamentary opposition, all hope 
 of bringing about the establishment of popery and of abso- 
 lute power in England by the subjection of Holland, was lost 
 to the government of the Stuarts. Charles, as when a battle 
 has been lost and the plans of a campaign made public, was 
 obliged to form another system of warfare against the irre- 
 concilable enemy with whom the restoration had placed him 
 in hostility. In reference to external policy, to follow, in 
 appearance, a course conformable with the interests of Eng- 
 land, at the same time keeping up with France relations 
 as to money, counsels, and assistance; with regard to the 
 interior, desisting from the too open protection given to 
 the papists, to conspire more secretly with them; to give some 
 
112 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1674- 
 
 • 
 
 distinction to the national representation, and until the sys- 
 tem of coups-d'état could be safely resumed, to proceed against 
 it by corruption and division: such was the conduct which the 
 existing state of things prescribed to the court. Osborne, 
 earl of Danby, who had distinguished himself in parliament as 
 a court partisan, was raised to office in accordance with these 
 double views, at the head of a ministry in which Lauderdale 
 remained, and of which Arlington for a short time was a 
 member. Osborne did not completely inherit the full confi- 
 dence which the Cabal had enjoyed. Charles II. employed 
 his brother to arrange his ulterior relations with Louis XIY. 
 Through the medium of the duke, still a determined partisan of 
 the French alliance, and who had long been dissatisfied that its 
 co-operation had not been thoroughly adopted, it was agreed: 
 that Charles ^nould prorogue parliament until the beginning 
 of 1675, and during the prorogation receive 1,500,000 French 
 livres from Louis; that he should then convoke it in order to 
 demand subsidies from it; and, if subsidies were refused, or 
 if the opposition made efforts to change the peace with Hol- 
 land into a declaration of war against France, Charles should 
 dissolve parliament, and receive a larger pension, regulated 
 according to his wants. In the meantime, Louis consented 
 that Charles should offer to him and to Holland a mediation 
 which could be rendered futile, but which would answer the 
 purpose of satisfying the English nation. 
 
 In consequence of these arrangements, it was necessary, 
 in order to deceive parliament, to give some éclat to the 
 feigned mediation. Charles selected, as his representative 
 with the plenipotentiaries of the two hostile nations, a man 
 who could not be suspected of lending himself to a fraud inju- 
 rious to England; this was sir William Temple. Previous 
 to his departure, the king had a conversation with him, full of 
 affected candour, in which he reproached himself, and per- 
 mitted Temple to address to him reproaches equally severe. 
 He pressed his hand, saying, with a studied pathos, that he 
 would be the father of his people, and dismissed him with 
 instructions whose utter vagueness belied all this display of 
 impossible intentions. Charles had already twice experienced 
 that he might make any attempt with ministers upon whom, 
 in the event of failure, the national indignation would fall, 
 while he, by abandoning them, regained to a certain extent 
 
 
1675.] 
 
 PROCEEDINGS OF THE DAMBY MINISTRY. 
 
 113 
 
 the confidence and almost the affection of his subjects; he 
 communicated to his new ministers such of his arrangements 
 with Louis as were to regulate their administration; then, 
 leaving them to themselves, he returned with delight to the 
 debaucheries from which he had been for awhile diverted by 
 the dangers of the late crisis. 
 
 Let us see what the new administration under Danby did. 
 Judging that the defeat of the court party had arisen 
 from the unexpected reconciliation between the presbyte- 
 rians and the members of the church of England, in order 
 to destroy this alliance, it conceived the idea of forming 
 another between the church of England party and the old 
 cavaliers, who since the restoration had been treated with a 
 neglect amounting to ingratitude. 
 
 This party, still advocating unconditional royalty, was 
 secretly intriguing to support the influence of the duke of York, 
 whose principles and interests were its own; it only differed 
 from its chief in that it neither desired nor rejected popery. 
 The first proceeding of the government was warmly to reprer 
 hend the conduct of the late ministry; they more especially 
 ■charged it with depriving the king of many good servants, by 
 leaving the cavaliers to grow old in poverty; and with having 
 given just alarm to the English churchmen by favouring 
 popery, which at best should only be tolerated. To conciliate 
 the cavaliers, they prepared new honours to the memory of 
 Charles I. They drew forth from some cellar an hitherto 
 unheeded statue, and set it up once more at Charing Cross; 
 magnificent obsequies were performed in honour of the de- 
 ceased prince in all the churches. To ingratiate the church- 
 men, they prosecuted a number of papists; they undertook 
 the reconstruction of the cathedral of Saint Paul, destroyed in 
 «the fire of London. Conferences were arranged between 
 them and some English bishops, in reference to a scheme 
 which was to destroy popery for the . benefit of the kingdom 
 and of the English church. In these conferences, it was pro- 
 posed that ail the sanguinary laws against the nonconformists, 
 without distinction of sect, should be again put in force, and 
 that there should be drawn up a political test, to be presented 
 to the two houses, as a complement of the religious test adopted 
 in the last session. 
 
 Louis XIV. having faithfully paid the 1, 500,000 livres he 
 
 i 
 
114 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1675- 
 
 had promised, Charles, on his side, had kept his word by 
 allowing parliament to remain prorogued until the spring of 
 1675; he then summoned it. His opening speech, unfavour- 
 able to the papists, flattered the members of the church of 
 England; recalled glorious recollections to the cavaliers; and 
 declared to the nation that on this occasion no subsidies 
 would be demanded. Yet, from the very outset, the commons 
 still showed themselves possessed by their incurable mistrust. 
 The ministers, in proof of their good intentions, put in exe- 
 cution some acts of severity against the papists, but distinct 
 facts showed that the aim was not altered, but only the 
 means better chosen. They said nothing as to what had 
 been produced by that mediation, cried up as a popular 
 measure, and in contempt of which Holland, accompanied in 
 its heroic resistance by the good wishes of all England, re- 
 mained exposed to the conquering fury of Louis XIV. 
 They did not ask for money, indeed, but this mere!}' sug- 
 gested that they relied upon discreditable resources, or in- 
 tended to levy taxes arbitrarily. Accordingly, the commons 
 brought in a bill which declared it to be high treason to levy 
 taxes not sanctioned by the two houses of parliament; a bill 
 which declared vacant all seats in the commons which were 
 occupied by men employed under government; a bill against 
 Jesuits and foreign priests; and, lastly, the impeachment of 
 Lauderdale. While these various propositions were under 
 discussion in the lower house, the ministry laid before the 
 upper house the new form of oath resolved upon in their con- 
 ferences with the bishops of the court party. They required 
 that every member of the two houses should publicly swear: 
 * I, A. B., do solemnly declare, that it is not lawful upon any 
 pretence whatsoever to take up arms against the king. And 
 that I do abhor the traitorous position of taking arms by his 
 authority against his person, or against those that are com- 
 missioned by him, in pursuance of such commission. And I 
 do swear that I will not at any time to come endeavour the 
 alteration of the government, either in church or state. So 
 help me God." This declaration was opposed to the reli- 
 gious principles of the presbyterians, and to the feelings of 
 the majority of the opposition. The court, therefore, trusted 
 that these would not take it, and w^ould withdraw from par- 
 liament, as the papists had been obliged to quit their offices. 
 
1677.] Shaftesbury's attack on the ministry. 115 
 
 Dauby, and the bishops of his .party, maintained that this 
 test was necessary, as the only means of distinguishing faith- 
 ful from disaffected subjects. They said, that the revolution 
 having substituted for sound monarchical doctrines, depraved 
 maxims— which many men still dared to profess and sought 
 to diffuse among the people, and that the clemency shown by 
 the king at the time of the restoration having been received by 
 these incorrigible men as a tacit admission that their revolt 
 against the late king was legitimate, it was now necessary to 
 condemn their horrible principles more energetically; that 
 no one should be compelled to take the new oath, but that 
 those who would not take it should at the utmost be only 
 entitled to toleration ; the ministry, however, contenting 
 itself with merely watching their proceedings, unless these 
 gave some fresh occasion for alarm. 
 
 The ministers naturally relied on the success of such 
 arguments in the upper house; for there, more even than 
 in the commons, the opposition had always introduced as a 
 leading condition in its attacks upon popery, declarations 
 of attachment to monarchical principles; but the question 
 here was no longer merely satisfying power upon matters 
 as futile in themselves as they might be dangerous in their 
 agitation. The progress of things indicated as possible, 
 and that at no distant period, illegal attacks, which would 
 provoke resistance of the same character, and the debates 
 proved that many members of the upper house regarded 
 insurrection as, in certain cases, permissible. The disclo- 
 sures made from the opposition benches by Buckingham 
 and Shaftesbury, had much to do with this avowal of a prin- 
 ciple alarming for the court. Shaftesbury, now become its 
 most formidable adversary, made it tremble as he met the 
 test, with arguments such as these: " We have seen, in the 
 last twenty years, what the value is of oaths imposed by 
 power; useless when subjects are happy and obey willingly 
 and of their own accord; and still more useless when subjects 
 are oppressed, and too feeble to throw off the yoke. Who 
 can natter himself, in the circumstances which I will not an- 
 ticipate, but which truly are quite possible, that he shall be 
 able to keep the nation fettered down by mere moral obli- 
 gation to the principles of nonresi stance? If it chanced, for 
 example, that a king were to desire to convert England into 
 
 i2 
 
116 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1675- 
 
 a French province, or to render her the tributary of a foreign 
 power, or were to call to his aid a French arniy, in' order to 
 establish the authority of the pope here, wmat oath tnihfëyofr 
 would be sufficient to make us let him have his way?" He 
 continued in this tone to tell all he knew of the projects of 
 the duke of York and of the king ; his speech produced the 
 most vivid sensation. The house, divided, and the bill was 
 only carried by a majority of two. The ministers were 
 about to lay it before the lower house, when an ; incident, 1 
 which Shaftesbury boasted of having giv0n rise to, in the 
 fear that the commons might consent to the test/ in order to 
 procure, the passing of their own bills, obliged the king' to 
 prorogue ; parliament. The affair arose out of one of those 
 differences between the two houses, which thW î è:£tr î e , me un- 
 certainty'; as to their respective attributes had a fi¥(Jûént 
 tendency to originate. Towards the end of 1675, parliament 
 having been again assembled, the dispute was renewed, and 
 the dWuMmi 01 ^ . $fô f Wrï6^3to^ 
 
 and by the opposition ihd,ënnitèly postponed 1 W'cferiiëp^iè^éë? 
 The king again prorogued parliament j after ^ ^hiv^în^ oteéâifiéd! 
 a subsidy,' the application of which he ; allowài fo'bè -pre- 
 scribed to hini/and thus parsed on to the term of his engage- 
 ment with Louis XIY. Other engagements followed, still 
 through the mediation of the duke of York; ' ■ ^By a 'new 
 agreement, Charles, undertook to continue J to' divert the at- 
 tention of England by his feigned mediation, and mt tffecën^ 
 tract any alliance on the continent ; without %e< 'è^sëriiPM 
 Louis, who was to give him 1,200,000 livres. ;!; K^à¥lianlent, 
 at its next meeting, again demanded the alliance ^itfK Holland, 
 Charles was to dissolve it, and to receive a larger Sum from 
 France. "Thé 'articles of this agreement, drawn %p by 
 Pvouyi|m£^^ 8BfiéBM& mmm 
 
 own hand» writing, there being ho 'one about him to 'Whom he 
 could con fide so hitrniliating a . trarisactiônt ^ sioJbio irifiillhd 
 While /Charles 'vm ÀMlf^MSiM^Wè^^^ii^ r E§pfftd 
 to France, his ministers were earnestly preparing 1 for" the 
 parliamentary contest which was to be resumed in tlïë ; éê^éiort 
 announced Tor the spring of 1677. They employed the sort 
 
 of trace brought about /by the disputés between the two 
 awn noBiaoqqo 9dt^hon9q Hdi ti? ïuïï .vomdlhi 
 
 ' dRib ^¥^e^ $$àgtf5& m d â sir John ^ &*&& 
 
1677.] COMPOSITION OF PARTIES. 117 
 
 houses, in struggling against the rapidly increasing strength 
 of the opposition; for, in proportion as doubt of the intentions 
 of the king gave place in men's minds to mournful con- 
 viction, the number of ministerial votes diminished; during 
 the Jbst fifteen years, death had carried off a great number 
 of them; the occasional elections, almost every one of them, 
 supplied new auxiliaries to the presbyterians, the zealous 
 members of the church of England, to the men of independent 
 fortunes, who had been the first to vote against the court, 
 and to form the nucleus of the opposition. Many members 
 even, who held office under it, refused to support it. Upon 
 nice questions they abstained from appearing, or if forced to 
 attend, voted with the opposition. There is a story of Harvey, 
 the queen's privy purse, who, having one day voted against 
 the ministry, was received with keen reproaches by the king; 
 the next day, on another division, he voted with the court; 
 when the king thanked him, he said, in a tone of deep afflic- 
 tion: " Yesterday, I voted against your majesty, to-day 
 against my conscience." Under the Cabal ministry, Clifford 
 had endeavoured to make up for these successive losses by 
 purchasing votes in the very heart of the opposition, and he 
 had frequently managed to corrupt influential men. Danby 
 had recourse to the same means, only he looked upon this 
 traffic of consciences in à different way; instead of addressing 
 himself to men distinguished by their talents, and who wanted 
 a higL prj£e, n jbe aimed at quantity, and assailed ordinary 
 people,, who cost much less, and w r hose votes, after all, accord- 
 ing to him, made up the list. But these ministerial recruits, 
 without talent, without influence, were not even numerous. 
 They were so maltreated in every debate that men almost 
 blushed to vote with them. At this period of the Danby 
 ministry, there was but one man of any great mark in the 
 whole court party; this was Seymour, lately one of the most 
 brilliant orators of the opposition. The great knowledge he 
 possessed of the interests and views of all the parties repre- 
 sented in the two houses, rendered him a most important 
 acquisition; he partly directed, in debate, the ministerial 
 phalanx, recently enlarged by a few churchmen and cavaliers 
 whom Danby had brought over to his project of counter- 
 alliance. But at this period the opposition numbered 
 Shaftesbury, Buckingham, ex-ministers; lord Cavendish, a 
 
118 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1677- 
 
 man of great ambition, whom disappointment had alienated 
 from the court; Thomas Lee, Vaughan, who had also aban- 
 doned it from discontent; and men of a higher character, sir 
 William Coventry, colonel Birch, sir William Waller, lord 
 Hussel, Littleton, and Powle, distinguished by various virtues 
 and merits, and whose every word carried with it the authority 
 of talent, patriotism, and tried convictions. 
 
 Such was the force and aspect of the two parties in par- 
 liament, when they faced each other in the beginning of 1677. 
 The situation of Holland, becoming exhausted by reverses, 
 which the prince of Orange met with indefatigable energy, 
 was now so deplorable, that it was impossible but that the 
 English government should be violently assailed with reference 
 to the inutility of its mediation. The king, in his opening 
 speech, gave no explanation of the matter, and Temple wrote 
 word that his instructions were diametrically opposed to the 
 assigned object of his mission. Hereupon, Coventry, in the 
 name of the public anxiety, made the demand, which Charles, 
 according to his promise to Louis, was to meet by the disso- 
 lution of parliament. He said, that to open war made against 
 Holland, contrary to the interests of England, there had suc- 
 ceeded, under the name of mediation, a covert and more 
 cruel war; that English regiments were in the pay of France; 
 that men were publicly raised for France in Scotland, all the 
 while that government made a show of negotiating with a view 
 to oblige that power to lay down arms; that it was time the 
 king should lay aside these futile forms, and take energetic 
 measures to save the United Provinces. The ministers, and 
 at the head of their adherents, Seymour, opposed the taking 
 sir William Coventry's complaints into consideration at all; 
 but they did not prevent the majority in both houses from 
 voting in common an address to the king representing the 
 extreme clanger to which the kingdom was exposed by the 
 excessive aggrandizement of France, and the necessity for 
 protecting Spanish Flanders and its own territories, by al- 
 liances which would tranquillize his people. Charles gave an 
 evasive answer. The houses renewed their requisition in a 
 more pressing manner, adding that the king might rely upon 
 their assistance and upon that of all his subjects, to enable 
 him to assume the attitude which befitted the dignity of 
 England. As there was no promise more calculated to touch 
 
1678.] RUPTURE WITH FRANCE. 119 
 
 him, he listened to this overture, and said that unless 60,000/. 
 were secured to him, he could not endanger himself by aban- 
 doning, with respect to France, the cautious policy to which 
 he had been reduced by the parsimony of the commons. He 
 added all he could think of to convince parliament that the 
 money voted by it should be applied to no other purpose than 
 that which they should prescribe. The question being 
 brought to this point, it was necessary, either that parliament 
 should grant the 60,000/. on the king's word, already so often 
 violated, or that the king, in order to obtain that sum, should 
 first declare an alliance with Holland; and on the one hand, 
 mistrust was so great, and on the other, the resolution to de- 
 ceive so fixed, that it was impossible to come to an under- 
 standing, and parliament was prorogued, the affairs of Holland 
 remaining in the same state as before, and the national dis- 
 content being at its height. . , „ , . M I • 
 
 Charles was thus thrown back amid all his dimculties. 
 Louis XIV. promised him two millions of livres more, if he 
 would continue the secret alliance, and dissolve parliament. 
 But what danger in such a course to a man who cherished 
 repose! Meantime, the alternative was pressing: he must 
 either quell the parliament — and to effect this he had no 
 money, and but a few thousand soldiers — or he must do what 
 parliament desired, break with Louis, and openly take part 
 with Holland. The latter determination could alone, at that 
 juncture, save the restoration. This was urgently repre- 
 sented to him by Danby. The efforts of the minister to revive 
 the principles and influence of the cavalier party had produced 
 but an ineffectual diversion. He saw this; and, accordingly, 
 his views, equally evil in purpose, were now better as to 
 effect. He told the king that, since parliament promised 
 60,000/., and only asked in return some demonstrations in 
 favour of Holland, he must do as they desired; that with 
 their money troops might be raised as for war with France, 
 and that these troops once levied, the king might dispose of 
 them as he should think fit, and against the opposition itself, 
 if necessary. The king greatly liked the expedient. " But," 
 said he, " how shall we persuade the duke of York to view 
 the matter in this light?" " He will be with us," said the 
 minister, " if he may hope for the command of the fleet or of 
 the army against whomsoever the one or the other has to 
 
120 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1677- 
 
 combat." The king made no further objection. Danby then 
 wrote to Temple that he had formed a sure plan for serving 
 William; that to this end, it was necessary for the prince, 
 as soon as the campaign of the year was finished, to come in 
 person to England; i that Charles was disposed to enter intoian 
 alliance witbdcrimiagainsfr InjàifeaKHS:;^ andithât thiélaOianGe, 
 if the prince ai ^Udesireddtiimighfc be cemented by his marriage 
 with the princess Mary, daughter of the duke of York. 
 
 William accordingly proceeded to London at the close of 
 the year ^Gïffaiga&ffcafe mï exébtwotàsi&jmàmwvfâtiàb con- 
 f^eaeè^ with hèsiilra>unbkd;ïièjiT!ad)aboufedo depart, hauhag, 
 realized nothing by his journey but the opportunity of closely 
 observing •ôndgètii4yijig .feftpairties^ and withaùtl&wkig said a 
 word about the n^rri age, f when Danby took upori himself to 
 make the first overture to the king upon this subject. ©hades. 
 testineaigr^^tô^rféepbnt;m^4e>iip objection beyond alleging 
 the inflexible obstinacy of theiidifkalof York. i^jBoinit is 
 easy," saideIgaBby,-M%mT^It]^ understand 
 
 that such lar-niarirâ age; is more for his own interest than foil 
 that aïjmiv majesty*? lAdl Ea^atid/i&^laQPmfed[,«ti seeing Musi 
 profess popish piinciplesvr>~I!f èjei^iwesvhi^IdQughîtefiito a 
 prince wh^-isnatithenhead of the protestant communion, it 
 will appeal that hi&fc^igicin k)bal^ activate ^mwiioas±o2Ùàxk\ 
 that rheddqesBaot ideairieitMrn^osei iifcou^sHirifliiyf.>oaie,Jil§tflcvfi£tv 
 on hi6:.<|hiidirèm ,, tn Ak^âiiûi^mUeljî partlyi^ tier usëibf tfeiss 
 argitoientjimd *jMtilf by rfaasf jaéthçrit^ • ;the ïMng< foarought i ifeifcn 
 brfitkerv/torr c^awsft refais fiâew-fig tlien^i having* assemlbfedr théi 
 council- he I sent for the prin de ; of Grange, and the whole 
 affûteras s(^tledî:bé^ôitbeHQcamcflrïos£lj' £tinis]XI¥jildariiftffi 
 at one andl the; same time the real aim of William V jdnraej^I/ 
 his marriage with the daughter of the duke of York, and the 
 political alliamce ivvhièhtwa^ to jeûsiiel i IAj m^seerigear: tfram Eng> 
 land notified to: him a plan of pacification to which he was invited 
 to-.^lDacritofâiatiofaeeiiif»'4pHdid.' not desire toiseeiEngteoid arm 
 agahistli^ 
 
 and t ies^eeia%] nagaèdat i rthè/ liï&ké uofl "Jidrtkq rwhioii oh# I -eon- 
 s ideréd/ r&ara a^erelyrafcia>efced gtee Imiti. . e / Meanjfeimev {Bàrilkxiq < i 
 his new ambassador^ -wrote, to him 5 that tbtartwci 3 princes 
 humbly supplicated 3rinfetal understand j tips&\ ite^iks in sjiite 
 of themselves thatiithô|tf had [sent ?to him^ that; they did not 
 
1678.] DISTRUST OF THE COMMONS. 121 
 
 desire war, but only yielded to the imperious exigencies 
 of their situation. These reasons did not in the least affect 
 Louis; he haughtily rejected the appeal, and sent word to 
 Charles, through Barilkm, that he withdrew his pension. 
 
 It wits not without bitter regret for the lost favours of 
 I^uis;ISI¥/Jjwiiicli>had enabled hint to live in obscure infamy, 
 and apparently exempt from danger, that Charles regarded 
 the violent resultslthat must inevitably follow upon the detec- 
 tion of the new deception eiounselled by Banby ; but all means 
 c^i«ub^er^geimieT©(^at-a'H' endbi -j*I» the beginning of 1678, 
 l>arliament:waB «on^okec^imné/iQhafcle^ declared ttt it that he 
 wâs-ééteimimedr to^ocour Hollands ''The union of the prince 
 of Qran^ei with ihis miede was y he said, ihb" pledge of his firm 
 intention." ■ ; He demanded two millions -sterling to levy an 
 armyuof thirty thousand men, and to extend the- navy. He 
 perhaps thougM it&lat>e>the proposal tfWould be received with 
 the sànieëcclamàtâAsIwhiéhithe people, soiea8ily deceived, had 
 everywfefeBe deni/foJKtli on first learning his change of policy. 
 But itiThisimpjb8siMe r ebEiKim*to^h*afVie û cmrëtâ thought which 
 those _who had longitseijvfediiihhn* and who now aided the 
 opposition^ iwould not at once discover. iâ£COiidingly, some 
 represented itha^t it i would (be better^ with this" subsidy of two 
 niffioiis,* rlortak© into rihei seririce oftiEngdand foreign troops, 
 who might, be )dismissedrJonr tte^edaration-bf^peaee^ than to 
 raise within the kingdom; a^'yârm^iwHicd^at' ailaber period, 
 might bj3;emiplffyeH againstj'pirliamtefatj! ^)th©rs -declared that 
 they wokliinesreriicredit ntlde genuine adoptk«fcfafc neiwi prin- 
 ciples//sojdongriias ? 3^aaitb^ remained* [naiiisteii and" Lauderdale 
 uh|«mishëdl Zliàstl^, th©)Cdmmon*:^miadÈ(iëd^'thaV -without 
 delays iihèyshiiftl37n[mw 
 
 wiih ifche situation «fuHieif kingdom- in reference toi *pi>pery. 
 These TTaribusobjeeticDii^ did' not pré vent» the f grant«xfi the sub- 
 sidy, and the actl aurthoming; the levy of troops^ from passing ; 
 for commands in the* newérniy ^véberpromised to;maiiy -mem- 
 bers of the uppmlKJiasei<jaiid>tiie^ felt the 
 neeessityiof lâaalicipaltiiig Louis 3SI Vain "the campaign about to 
 open. The objections, lao^evfef^ih^dïôated'aiiaiô trust which, 
 towards the end of that session, l>urst forth in- violent storms. 
 The warlike preparations of England were as yet only 
 intended to make her respected in the negotiations which 
 
122 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 were opened at Nymegen between her and France, Spain, 
 and Holland. The duke of Monmouth departed with three 
 thousand men to cover Ostend; troops, which the duke 
 of York was to command, were actively raised to support 
 him, and all those already on foot were recalled from the 
 various points where they were not absolutely needed. Scot- 
 land thus found herself for a time released from the forces 
 which, for ten years, had maintained the royal government 
 there. In this unhappy country nothing was changed; the 
 odious parliament which, in the early years of the restoration, 
 had sullied itself with so many infamous condemnations, 
 still trembled under Lauderdale and archbishop Sharp, and 
 made the nation tremble by its facility in sanctioning all the 
 acts of tyranny which these two men exercised in the name 
 of Charles. 
 
 The presbyterian church, still outlawed, lived in the con- 
 sciences and affections of men. Eighteen years' existence 
 had not yet given prescription either to episcopacy or to 
 royalty. Military occupation ceasing for an instant, the 
 presbyterian conventicles, wliich Charles called the nurseries 
 of revolt, soon reappeared, more especially in the w r estern 
 Lowlands. Lauderdale interdicted them, according to the 
 rigorous laws already existing; but his orders, unsupported 
 by soldiers, were treated with contempt. He broke out into 
 empty threats, saying, that he would make a desert of those 
 counties unless all the landed proprietors there prevented their 
 farmers, tenants, and servants, men, women, and children, 
 from attending the conventicles: the proprietors answered, 
 that they could only engage to obey the law for themselves. 
 Lauderdale then wrote to London, that Scotland was in a 
 state of revolt, and that he must have troops, and unlimited 
 powers. The ministry immediately sent artillery and cavalry 
 to Scotland, and, as it had not sufficient forces at its disposal, 
 it authorized Lauderdale to employ the mountain clans, who, 
 from time immemorial, were the fierce enemies of their 
 Lowland neighbours. These barbarians fell upon the presby- 
 terian districts, devastating the cultivated lands, and carry- 
 ing off the flocks and herds as in the old times. The pres- 
 byterians, compelled to defend their houses and fields, opposed 
 a vigorous resistance. Lauderdale summoned them to deliver 
 up their arms, and added a prohibition to the richer classes to 
 
1679.] ALARM OF THE OPPOSITION. 123 
 
 keep a horse worth more than 4L The duke of Hamilton, 
 and several other distinguished noblemen, went to Edinburgh 
 for the purpose of pacifying him; their arrival threw him 
 into utter fury; in full council he tucked up his sleeves to 
 the elbow, and. swore that, by God, they should repent it, if 
 they did not immediately return to their estates, and support 
 the royal troops. Learning afterwards, that they proposed 
 going to London to supplicate Charles himself, he forbad any 
 one whomsoever to quit Scotland without his special permission; 
 but, in spite of him, ten or twelve of the great noblemen, 
 among others the duke of Hamilton, and lords Athol and 
 Perth, passed the border. 
 
 Parliament was sitting when the Scottish lords arrived; it 
 received their complaints with warm sympathy. It w r as no 
 longer the time when no one in England was touched by the 
 afflictions of the Scottish presbyterians. Englishmen now 
 heartily felt with them; they believed themselves menaced 
 with the same sufferings; they no more abandoned them as 
 dangerous sectaries; they saw in them a people who were 
 made victims upon whom to make experiments, of a tyranny 
 which it was not as yet thought advisable to attempt in Eng- 
 land. Every one indignantly cited the answer given by the 
 king to the Scottish lords: ' " I see well enough," said he, " that 
 Lauderdale has dealt harshly with you, but I do not see that 
 he has done anything contrary to my interests. " Those who 
 had opposed the levy of regular troops raised a cry of alarm; 
 they said that England would soon be treated like Scotland. 
 Seeing the duke of York at the head of the army, now on its 
 way to the continent, they presaged, with fear, all that 
 would result from that armed intervention, which of late they 
 had so earnestly and so imprudently solicited. 
 
 This sudden change in the views of those who had forced 
 Charles to hostile demonstrations against Louis XIV., was 
 occasioned at once by events which redoubled the habitual 
 apprehensions of parliament, and by fresh terrors which 
 Barillon contrived to spread for his master's purposes. Secret 
 information, given by him to the leaders of the opposition, 
 confirmed their suspicions as to the new projects of the mi- 
 nistry. And herein consisted all the influence which this am- 
 bassador, upon deserting the cause of Charles, exercised over 
 the fluctuations and waverings observable in the conduct of 
 
124 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 the opposition with regard to the affairs of Holland. If he 
 purchased a few mercenary votes, and if, to keep up the 
 divisions, he made them vote sometimes with one party, some- 
 times with another, these obscure intrigues, stifled in a con- 
 flict of passions and of interests which they did not compre- 
 hend, merit no development in a history like the present. 
 The contradictions of parliaiB^t^{s^bj^otiJd(aIS!99*^df fantastic 
 but enduring law, to thatinstinet of mistru^mfaiHble in/its 
 inspirations, which consisted in saying tAyfetr whenever the 
 court said No ? f and jjfo when it said Aye, at ^length ceased j 
 when peace abruptly terminated 5 <tbe jflôifereffikeeiudofc Mymft* 
 gen. sjiîfeî'tlft d^W f ^WteèXÏF^îi*toe iseemedoitomhave 
 obtained what he desired, for Charles was on the point of 
 
 the ratification reached him ; at the samej m&msqt Jhftiopposik 
 tion again; began to desire war* in mùe?v$Q)hmipltàie army of 
 the duke of York out of the kingdom; finally,: the priiïcéîôÊ 
 Orange, informed indirectly of the result of the conferences, 
 attacked the French,; in order to give themnà iprekeM /fe^a 
 rupture. The peace, howeyér, (Wast^^iiaffea^n^^ ^raiiee^ars 
 g^ to dictate it oi^in$re}oan^^ 
 
 territory, after a war which had threatened to efface her 
 from the list of nations. As to England/ it was an event 
 advantageous also to her, in giving great materia!, fofrcè titx 
 power, which, rendering it more enterprisii^,Tefaastenèd the 
 accomplishment of things. , : - Ad 'to noiiibnoo no <i*ioY 
 Parliament, on hearing of the //peace* , sa wbj&IL it)€*4àilgearM^ 
 and strove to prevent them] ;by^jpalmjy wmtimg upanl.-iba 
 disbanding of the troops immediately ttpon^thejana^iumltt&e 
 impeachment of Lauderdale, and an end beings f>nti terlihe 
 frightful system which was desolating Scotland. As to the 
 latter point, the king made some concessions; he gave orders 
 that the mountain clans should evacuate the Lowlands; but 
 with regard to the disbanding of the troops coming from 
 Holland, hé declared that, being unable to liquidate the 
 arrears of their pay, he should be obliged to keep them 
 on foot. Parliament saw that this was only, a pretext; it 
 was prorogued. Most of the members returning to their 
 counties, were so persuaded that in the next session the 
 troops would be employed against them, that they announced 
 their intention not to resume their seats. This opinion 
 
1679.] THE POPISH PLOT. 125 
 
 rapidly communicating itself to all classes of the nation, a 
 gloomy stupor already exhibited to them England given 
 up like Scotland to military executions, and sold by a par- 
 liament like that which legalized all Lauderdale's acts of 
 yk&esme) when a circumstance which seemed to arise out of 
 the way situation of things, Suddenly called religious fana- 
 ticism to the aid of public libé^. 1 ^' 1 ^ ^° BiroitoiEraiioo 
 
 A LohQtta Chemist; -one Kii^by, and a doctor named Tongue, 
 having procm-ed/fo audience of the king and the minister, 
 Oaaby^ dien;«rahcBd the existence of a popish: G piotV which was 
 soon td hmak>w&; ' The man frôni^hônï 1 Wéf ' derived their 
 inforniatiobjwas-a certain Titus Oates, whom thé' jesnits had 
 intrusted ^^ ^ariotâs missions into Holland and Spain ; they 
 i^iaat^Msspkee e£ïabôde. Titus Oates, summoned 1 before 
 tfeo<çqarfôil, tp»et*i0us>f$^ ^bcèëdîtlg^tnitfei^ Vëitt' W 1I J a stfë^ 
 Godfrey, anid< pradé an affidavit before him, that the papists 
 had formedr^the/ 1 project^ of- killing' the king in 'order to give 
 the crown -to ^the duke of York-; that the affair had been 
 res^ T <?& *q*&n dm a congregation called The" Propaganda; helct 
 at RomepWy ttetpcipe^ Clement X. ; that in this assembly the 
 km£jfjdmg^e#o&^ 
 
 oiâieèMposed fr^^i&r&&<é âkwterMig; Wàtthe holy see 
 laying the kingdom^ unâer interdict, ad interim, had given 
 the lieutenancy of it to- Olivia; 4he ; genera 1 ! of the Jesuits, and 
 that. blifô'ji^Ufer.i^^'i^^t^anisf^r'Mé a-uthority to the duke of 
 York, on condition of his establishing popery in England; 
 th&*gltè#)QôZ. Md/'bèen ^warded to Eondoù by tnè Jesuit 
 Lâchais^ pnfebsat.' ^hmiÈi^imlHo^f^ki jssaÉffltff tfiSf 
 a^theijf j^suat'diad offered to ' commit 1 the crime ; that as soon 
 aslthey Hac} gpti*M b^-lhB- kltfg, aii-army was to be levied to 
 prbckim&is frrot&er^ Oates produced the names and eom- 
 misMtmsrod&allf those ! whom the' conspirators intended i6 place 
 aludhe^heaxlvef the' government and of the popish army. 
 
 Whether -or -no some madmen had formed a plot to this 
 effect, lytiia^oèrtain that nothing in the depositions of Oates 
 was more odious than what 1 hàé been related of the arrange- 
 ments of-vCharlesw^ Louis XIV.; nor, in the means 8f 
 execution .alleged against the • conspMAfrs, ^ÔtBiâ^'more 
 absurd tbafi those which the duke of York, as we learn from 
 his Memoirs, had devised for securing the triumph of popery. 
 Doubtless, something of that real and enduring conspiracy, 
 
326 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 planned by the reigning family against the nation, had trans- 
 pired; there were thirty thousand soldiers under arms; the 
 national representatives were menaced; the manner in which 
 the peace of JNymegen was accepted by England has just 
 been mentioned. In such a state of things, Titus Oates, 
 making himself the organ of the popular rumours, devoting 
 himself, perhaps from want, perhaps from enthusiasm, to the 
 responsibility of affirming upon oath things which all the 
 world believed to exist, Titus Gates, despised by those who 
 were acquainted with his career, treated as an impostor by 
 the king, by the council, and, with the exception of justice 
 Godfrey, by all those who officially received his depositions, 
 would naturally be listened to with transports by the people, 
 ever credulous in proportion to its hate and its fear. There was 
 universal excitement. Calmer minds thought that Titus 
 Oates stated more than he knew; the impetuous multitude 
 looked upon him as knowing even more than he said. 
 
 Authority, compelled to indulge a prejudice which it would 
 have been dangerous to oppose, treated with the utmost 
 attention and respect a man whom it regarded as a rogue. 
 He was solicited as earnestly as though the safety of the state 
 depended on what it should please him to conceal or to avow. 
 His declarations each day implicated an increasing number 
 of important personages; foreign princes, the duke of York, 
 the queen, were named, after infinite contradictions and hesita- 
 tions, which the populace regarded as manifesting Gates to be- 
 internally agitated with fears, and thus redoubled their interest 
 in him, and their indignation against those whom he pointed 
 out to public fury. Of his many astounding statements, some 
 were corroborated by indiscreet expressions which escaped the 
 duke of York; nay, one absolute truth appeared: Gates had 
 said that the secretary of the duchess of York, the Jesuit 
 Coleman, had been named by the pope his secretary of state 
 in England. Search was made in the apartments of this 
 Coleman, and among his papers several letters were found 
 which related to extensive popish plots. In one he said: 
 " We have here a mighty work upon our hands; no less 
 than the conversion of three kingdoms; and by that, perhaps, 
 the utter subduing of a pestilential heresy which has domi- 
 neered over a great part of this northern world a long time. 
 There never were such hopes of success since the death of 
 
1679.] 
 
 AFFAIR OF SIR EDMONDSBURY GODFREY. 
 
 127 
 
 our queen Mary, as now in our days when God lias given us 
 a prince who is become (I may say by miracle) zealous of 
 being the author and instrument of so glorious a work. 
 
 " I can scarce believe myself awake, or the thing real, when 
 I think of a prince, in such an age as we live in, converted 
 to such a degree of zeal and piety, as not to regard anything 
 in the world in comparison of God Almighty's glory, the 
 salvation of his own soul, and the conversion of our poor 
 kingdom. Money cannot fail of persuading the king to any- 
 thing. There is nothing it cannot make him do, were it ever 
 so much to his prejudice. It has such an absolute power 
 over him that he cannot resist it. Logic in our court, built 
 upon money, has more powerful charms than any other sort 
 of argument." 
 
 This letter, however susceptible of explanation, seemed an 
 unanswerable confirmation of all that which in the depositions 
 of Gates was not manifestly false. 
 
 This discovery had just been made, when justice Godfrey 
 disappeared. He was found a few days afterwards, in the 
 environs of London, pierced through with his own sword; but 
 the state of the body proved that the unhappy man had not 
 fallen until after a long struggle. Who had given the blow? 
 this was never known. Drops of wax upon sir Edinonds- 
 bury^s clothes made it supposed that he had been assassin- 
 ated in the night, and by priests, for at that time "wax 
 was only made use of in churches and in the houses of the 
 great noblemen. Moreover, Godfrey had incurred the hatred 
 of the papists by his encouragement of the disclosures of 
 Oates. He was honoured by a magnificent funeral, at which 
 all the church-of- England clergy were present. The enor- 
 mous population of London followed the hearse, now silent 
 and mournful, now bursting out into cries, not of regret, 
 but of rage. The men were armed, iron chains were drawn 
 across the streets, and palisades prepared at the gates, as if 
 some violence on the part of the court was apprehended on 
 the occasion of these menacing obsequies. 
 
 Meantime the king w^as obliged to convoke parliament. 
 His opening speech was looked for ward to with impatience, as 
 the profession of faith of the court on the subject of the plot. 
 Danby had counselled Charles to appear convinced that his 
 life was threatened by the papists; this, he said, would be an 
 
128 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 admirable mode of rendering himself dear to the people. 
 Charles, with better reason, thought that it was not fitting 
 for him to accept as a mark of attachment to his person, that 
 which was only hatred towards the papists. He, accordingly, 
 freely said what he thought of the disclosures of Oates. 
 Much to his displeasure, the two houses expressed an entirely 
 different opinion: they declared that the facts revealed were 
 of a nature to occupy them for the present to the exclusion of 
 all other business. They demanded a public fast; assigned to 
 Titus Oates a pension of 1200/., and apartments in the palace 
 of Whitehall; finally, they expressed a desire that a guard should 
 be given him for his preservation from the fate of Godfrey, 
 assassinated, said they, by the papists. While the inquiry 
 lasted, they assemblée! twice a day. Oates repeated and en- 
 larged upon his disclosures; he was applauded with frantic 
 transports. Another informer, named Bedloe, also reckoning 
 on the public favour, came forward. He made oath that jus- 
 tice Godfrey had been assassinated in Somerset-house by 
 catholics, among whom were some of the queen's domestics. 
 Passing from this particular fact, concerning which he fur- 
 nished no proof, to the plot in general, and, with an affecta- 
 tion of deep remorse, declaring that, seduced by brilliant 
 promises, he had himself joined it, he made a deposition 
 evidently founded on that of Oates, but received as though a 
 distinct confirmation of the latter. Bedloe asserted himself 
 to be acquainted, not only with the details of the conspiracy 
 then denounced, but of those of a multitude of plots formed 
 by the papists since the restoration. 'His declarations, for the 
 most part contradictory, were eagerly read by the public, as 
 collected in a book with the following singular title: — "A 
 narrative and impartial discovery of the horrid popish plot, 
 carried on for burning and destroying the cities of London 
 and Westminster with their suburbs ; setting forth the 
 several consults, orders, and resolutions of the Jesuits, con- 
 cerning the same: by Captain William Bedloe, lately engaged 
 in that horrid design, and one of the popish committee for 
 carrying on such fires." 
 
 Many other libels, dictated, as this, by hatred, and a desire 
 for gain, were profusely spread abroad, and transferred to 
 the streets of London the great trial which was preparing in 
 parliament. But everything, in the tumultuous meetings to 
 
1679.] PROSECUTION OF CATHOLICS. 129 
 
 which the circumstances gave rise, was taken as proof, when 
 the tribunal which, notwithstanding its elevated position, 
 shared in the need of believing the charges, sanctioned them 
 generally by the following declaration : "The lords and 
 commons are of opinion that there is, and hath been^ a 
 damnable and hellish plot, contrived and carried on by 
 popish recusants, for assassinating and murdering, the king, 
 for subverting the government, and uprooting and destroying 
 the protestant religion." 
 
 And now commenced, before the courts of justice and the 
 upper house, a sombre prosecution of the catholic lords 
 Arundel, Petre, Stafford, Powis, Bellasis, the Jesuits Coleman, 
 Ireland, Grieve, Pickering, and, in succession, all who were 
 implicated by the indefatigable denunciations of Titus Oates 
 and Bedloe. Unhappily, these courts of justice, desiring, in 
 common with the whole nation, to condemn rather than to 
 examine, wanted neither elements which might, if strictly 
 acted upon, establish legal proof of conspiracy against some 
 of the accused, nor terrible laws to destroy them when found 
 guilty. And it was here that a spectacle, at first imposing, 
 became horrible. No friendly voice arose to save those men 
 who were guilty only of impracticable wishes, of extravagant 
 conceptions. The king, the duke of York, the French am- 
 bassador, thoroughly acquainted as they were with the real 
 nature of these imputed crimes, remained silent; they were 
 thoroughly cowed. No generous remonstrance was made by 
 the enlightened men, who saw in this accusation merely a 
 specious but useful argument against popery. Many influ- 
 ential' members of the two houses regarded Oates and Bedloe, 
 to use lord Shaftesbury's expression, as men fallen from 
 heaven expressly to save England from tyranny. They 
 made it a fearful system with them not to combat, in minds 
 weaker than their own, a credulity arising from fear and 
 from a love of the marvellous. There were some, and among 
 others Seymour, who seized this pretext of dangers incurred 
 by the king, to pass over, with popular applause, to the 
 opposition; and hence that concurrence of men of all parties 
 and of every opinion, in punishing utterly vague projects 
 under the determinate form given them by the voice of the 
 informers. 
 
 This unanimous adoption of a popish plot, taken as a type 
 
 K 
 
130 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 of all that royalty, since its re-establishment, had been charged 
 with, unhappily demanded victims; and the nation, through 
 its representatives, drew back no more from these odious 
 results, than it had from the necessity of sacrificing the more 
 ardent partisans of the revolution, when its terrors recalled 
 the Stuarts. The low knaveries of the restoration, and the 
 crimes of its earlier years, were perpetrated for the safety of 
 general interests; and since then, those interests, well or ill 
 understood, had formed the law. They had led the counter- 
 revolution to the overthrow of the presbyterian church, and 
 of the national party, who desired neither bishops nor king. 
 Royalty wished to continue the movement to its own profit, 
 and for that of the odious religion for which torrents of blood 
 had been shed by queen Mary. General interests separated, 
 not from the principle of monarchy, but from views which 
 tended to consolidate it at the expense of all liberty. They 
 had made royalty adventurous, and at first suffered for what 
 they had done for it; but by strongly attaching themselves to 
 that which they had not yet sacrificed to it, to English protest- 
 antism, to the political constitution, an imperfect collection of 
 guarantees obtained by twenty generations, to legislation, 
 such as the parliamentary storms, the precursors of the revo- 
 lution, had made it, they created, and only just in time, a 
 resistance. 
 
 Parliament, as a whole, faithfully represented general 
 interests in their successive modifications during the seven- 
 teen years which had elapsed between the restoration and the 
 popish plot. So long as it fluctuated between the fear of 
 despotism and that of absolute liberty, it compounded with 
 royalty, and manoeuvred its forces to keep at an equal 
 distance between the two equally dangerous extremities, so as 
 not to incur the shame of defeat, and to avoid the inevitable 
 consequences of a complete victory. But, like the nation, 
 it gradually outgrew the impression produced by the ex- 
 cesses committed in the name of liberty, and, proportion- 
 ately, lost the men of the generation which had suffered 
 from those excesses. The partial renewals supplied by elec- 
 tions, whose spirit responded to the progress of the popular 
 discontent, introduced into the commons, in the train of 
 the members of the church of England, who had commenced 
 the opposition, presbyterians, patriots, without zeal for any 
 
1679.] PROSECUTION OF CATHOLICS. 131 
 
 particular creed, disgraced ministers, masters of all the secrets 
 of the court, and, lastly, men who openly professed republican 
 principles. The latter being, in the opposition, the only 
 members who had a decided aim, that of overthrowing the 
 reigning family, laboured more earnestly than any for the 
 gradual recovery of all which the general surprise at the mo- 
 ment of the revolution had given to it. 
 
 Thus this royal will, which passed as all-powerful, had not 
 even the force of a definite and limited prerogative. When 
 it exhibited its inclination to protect the papists, it was anti- 
 cipated by their being involved in the general proscription of 
 dissenting sects. It claimed the power of raising troops at 
 its pleasure, and of keeping the militia on foot: old laws, 
 suspended but not repealed by the restoration, were opposed 
 to it, or it was refused subsidies. It employed ministers 
 under whose good intentions it concealed its own: they were 
 assailed, and paid the penalty it had incurred. Tired of fruitless 
 lying, it called to its councils men without morality or re- 
 ligion, and proceeded, by coups-d'état, against the national 
 religion and the national representatives: it was refused aid 
 in the foreign wars which were to establish this new system, 
 and its mistakes forced it to sacrifice its counsellors, and to 
 sanction a religious test which deprived it of its most devoted 
 servants. Returning to the legal struggle, it attempted to 
 oppose to the religious, a political test, according to the doc- 
 trines of absolute power: the right of insurrection was pro- 
 claimed to its very face. Lastly, when a skilfully-planned 
 fraud procured for it the support of a standing army, the 
 popish conspiracy was invented against it, audit was for some 
 time kept down by this fabrication, which was sustained with 
 a completeness and an earnest determination unexampled in 
 the history of any nation. But the victory thus obtained was 
 not a legitimate one; and it had these deplorable features, 
 that it disturbed or corrupted many consciences, that when 
 the impulse given by it began to subside, it left nothing of 
 this great crisis but a stain, and that the very men who had 
 once saved themselves by imposture, had not public virtue 
 enough to take arms when insurrection became a necessity. 
 
 Kl ; 
 
132 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 i 
 
 A NEW BEVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT. 
 
 Political results of the popish plot — Boldness of parliament— Discovery of 
 the relations with France — Influence of this discovery on the elections 
 for a new parliament — Spirit of the lower house — Affairs of the Danby 
 ministry — Advice of sir William Temple — Bill to exclude the duke of 
 York from the succession — Besistance of the court — Progress of the 
 republican spirit in the lower house — The members of the church of 
 England reconciled with the court — Doubts of the nation favourable 
 to the republican party — The intentions of the party disclosed — Par- 
 liament of Oxford — Abrupt defeat of the republican party. 
 
 The popish plot having extricated parliament and the 
 nation from the greatest danger they had been menaced 
 with since the revolution, the irritated public mind easily 
 persuaded itself that henceforward there was no means of 
 defence but in attack. The king had not accepted the kind 
 of respectful exception which, even amidst the fury against 
 the abettors of popery, had been made in his favour, by 
 affecting to think him innocent and even menaced by the 
 conspirators. The duke of York had at first despised, as of 
 light consequence, or at least as destitute of proof, the accu- 
 sations which were diverted from the king and thrown upon 
 him. Public indignation, thus braved, felt itself authorized 
 no longer to impose upon itself a moderation in its power, 
 for which it had not hitherto received any credit. While the 
 courts of justice by their prosecutions kept up popular ere- 
 
1679.] A NEW TEST CARRIED. 133 
 
 clulity on the subject of the plot, and struck with the arm of 
 the law all whom law could attain, parliament enlarged the 
 field of legal vengeance, and proposed enactments which 
 might strike its enemies, even at the foot of the throne. 
 
 The eager delight with which the most violent motions 
 against the papists were received, scarcely left the few dis- 
 tracted friends whom they retained at court time to recollect 
 themselves. A new church of England test, much more 
 rigorous than that which had overthrown the reign of the 
 Cabal, passed almost without opposition. One of those who 
 supported it in the upper house (lord Lucas), spoke of it in 
 terms, the coarse brutality of which would not have been 
 tolerated a few months before: 6i I would not have so much 
 as a popish man, or a popish woman to remain here; not so 
 much as a popish dog or a popish bitch; not so much as a 
 popish cat to pur and mew about the king." 
 
 Yet these words were loudly applauded. The duke of 
 York, then present, demanded a personal exception, and ex- 
 pressed himself with as much courage as propriety. He was 
 listened to with impatience, and only obtained the exception 
 by a majority of two votes. The bill had been directed 
 against him. 
 
 The discovery of one of the sets of correspondence con- 
 taining demands of money from Louis XIV., gave fresh 
 daring to the spirit of hostility against the reigning family. 
 It personally compromised the king. Lord Montague, who 
 had been his minister in France, had, in consequence of some 
 indiscretions, incurred his displeasure, and then his hate 
 because he threw himself into the opposition. By an order, 
 the imprudence of which is inconceivable, Montague was 
 accused of having kept up a correspondence with the pope, 
 and of having disclosed the secrets of his government to 
 France. In making use against an old favourite of this 
 popular weapon, continually menacing himself, the king 
 hoped that Montague would be unable to prove by whose 
 instructions he had, during his embassy, promoted the popish 
 intrigues. But Montague had preserved the official letters 
 which contained those instructions; and, when summoned 
 before a court of justice, he produced them. One of them, 
 written by Danby, who in this affair displayed a fierce 
 inveteracy against Montague, ordered him to require from 
 
134 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1678- 
 
 Louis XIV. an annual subsidy, for three years, of 300,000/., 
 in order that the king, during that time, might be able to 
 dispense with parliament. Here was revealed the whole his- 
 tory of the treacherous mediation in the Dutch war. The 
 letter did not bear the royal seal, but at the bottom were 
 the following words, in the king's own hand-writing: " This 
 letter is writ by my order — Charles." 
 
 Parliament could not lose the right to investigate such a 
 matter; it took possession of the letters. The solicitor- 
 general Winnington made a report upon them, and demanded 
 the impeachment of the minister who had written them. 
 " I see," said he, " the interests of England and our faith 
 sworn to our allies, sacrificed to the thirst for French gold, 
 made use of to deprive us of our national representation: is 
 not this selling the country, and upsetting the constitution? 
 I say 'tis the crime of high treason, and for that crime I 
 demand that my lord Danby be impeached." 
 
 A bill of impeachment was immediately voted by the 
 commons, and carried to the upper house, where there was 
 every reason to believe it would be adopted, when the king, 
 alarmed at the probable consequences of this impeachment, 
 in order to delay it, prorogued parliament. 
 
 It was necessary that government should without delay 
 follow up this proceeding; the nation was not in a temper to 
 endure a long prorogation. Danby advised the dissolution of 
 parliament, and urged upon the king, the duke of York, the 
 influential members of the opposition in the upper house, that 
 they would find their advantage in an entire renovation of 
 the lower house. He told the king and the duke, that by a 
 judicious use of what money there was in the treasury, they 
 might secure royalist elections, and that, at all events, it was 
 impossible that the new house could be more unfavourably 
 composed than that which they would get rid of; he gave the 
 opposition lords to understand that if the house of commons 
 were retained, and carried his impeachment, the king would 
 be obliged to take ministers acceptable to that house, whereas it 
 had already so changed about, that a very few popular mea- 
 sures would suffice to bring it back to its former royalist zeal. 
 This apprehension of the versatility of the house of commons 
 existed in point of fact among the opposition lords, and in a 
 late session had induced some of them to demand its dissolu- 
 
1679.] MEETING OF A NEW PARLIAMENT. 135 
 
 tion. They supported with all their connexions at court the 
 views of Danby, who, on his part, promised to leave the 
 ministry. The dissolution was resolved upon, and the king 
 pronounced it in the beginning of January, 1679. 
 
 Another miscalculation destroyed the hopes which had 
 been founded upon this measure. The court exerted itself 
 in vain to procure the election of men of its own views; 
 the national party had the advantage. It found a means, by 
 multiplying freeholds of multiplying votes, and of thus call- 
 ing a larger portion of the inferior classes to the defence of 
 their interests. The reports which reached London from all 
 parts of the kingdom, of the conduct of the people at the 
 elections, were so alarming, the public professions of faith of 
 the candidates so menacing to the papists in general, and the 
 duke of York audaciously held up as the soul of all their 
 plots, that the king, before assembling the new parliament, 
 thought it advisable to remove his brother, as much to screen 
 him from what his enemies, irritated at his presence, might 
 undertake against him, as to appear a sharer in the dissatis- 
 faction which he had occasioned. 
 
 The session began; all the old opposition had been re- 
 elected; among the new members, the presbyterians were the 
 more numerous, and their political friends were full of the 
 design, most formidable to the counter-revolution, of turning 
 out the reigning family. If this were not actually the desire 
 of the whole house, the passions which animated it tended 
 absolutely to the same end. Events, perils of the same kind 
 as those which the long parliament made use of as a weapon, 
 had again brought into favour the plans of reform preached 
 forty years before, against enormous abuses now renewed. 
 They were no longer the dreams of mystic perfection, the 
 adventurous hopes that had precipitated the first steps of the 
 revolution; but in their place the profound resentment, the 
 swelling of the heart of men too long reduced to form an 
 opposition on principles not their own, and who now, by a 
 powerful internal reaction, were reverting to those which they 
 blushed ever to have discarded. They perhaps thought them- 
 selves strengthened by experience, and able to dominate the 
 popular passions. And, whatever the result, it clearly 
 appeared that a fresh appeal to those passions was with many 
 a duty of conviction, with the majority, a desperate attempt. 
 
136 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1679— 
 
 The new parliament was very little moved by what the 
 keeper of the great seal, Nottingham, said, in his desire to 
 magnify the greatness of the sacrifice which the king had made 
 of his affections in removing the duke of York. The im- 
 peachment of Danby was again demanded with more vehe- 
 mence even than in the last parliament; it was in vain Danby 
 set his friends in motion in either house; his opponents per- 
 sisted, not from any special hatred towards him, but because 
 they desired that he should defend himself by inculpating the 
 king. Charles, seeing to what this perseverance tended, was 
 so imprudent as himself to tear aside the veil of ministerial 
 responsibility. He thought to impose silence by declaring to 
 parliament that his minister had done nothing but by his 
 orders; that he therefore exonerated him from the impeach- 
 ment brought against him, and thought fit to give him a 
 warrant of pardon; "and should any one represent it as 
 invalid, he will find us able to secure the protection of the 
 laws to a man who has faithfully served us." 
 
 Though he had an army at his orders, to support this de- 
 claration of his good pleasure, the challenge was accepted. 
 Orators, among others Seymour and Winnington, denied 
 that the royal prerogative could protect a minister from 
 public vengeance. " It was the people after all who suffered 
 from the treasons and misconduct of ministers, and there was 
 no satisfaction for them in a royal pardon, but only in the 
 punishment of the guilty." The friends of Danby proposed 
 a compromise* the exiling him^ as Clarendon had formerly 
 been exiled. But they who supported the impeachment cried: 
 " What is the use of a constitution? What of the pretended 
 responsibility of ministers? You had better declare at once 
 that for the future men charged with public trusts may 
 traffic in the honour and interests of the nation, and be let 
 off for an excursion to the continent." 
 
 Danby, left without hope, retired, and shortly afterwards 
 was sent to the Tower, by order of the house of com- 
 mons; but the royal prerogative was shaken. As the fer- 
 mentation among the people responded to the violence shown 
 by the commons, Charles, once again placed in the alternative 
 of violating the constitution by a coup-oVétat, or of abandon- 
 ing the administration composed of the creatures and friends 
 of Danby, adopted the least dangerous resolution, that of 
 
1680.] 
 
 FORMATION OF A NEW COUNCIL. 
 
 137 
 
 forming a new ministry, and he once more had recourse to 
 the integrity and sound judgment of sir William Temple. 
 
 Sir William Temple gave advice which, if it had been 
 followed, would perhaps have terminated the counter-revo- 
 lution. He told Charles that it was already very late to 
 think of saving the nation from tyranny, or royalty from a 
 second fall; that however there was a means which appeared 
 to him calculated to re-establish confidence, and to produce a 
 firm order of things; that hitherto the conduct of govern- 
 ment had depended on the particular character and intentions 
 of two or three ministers, subject to a factitious responsibi- 
 lity; that it was necessary to associate with the interests of 
 the crown, to as large an extent as possible, councillors who, 
 from their independent position, their principles and their 
 fortune, shared equally the national interests, and to do 
 nothing except with their advice. " That advice," he added, 
 " will invariably be the expression of the general interests, 
 essentially friendly to order, to economy in the expenses of the 
 government at home, and to the maintenance of the national 
 glory abroad." 
 
 Charles decided upon forming a council of this kind, and 
 promised to consult it in all that he should do; but he com- 
 posed it half of officers of the crown, and, against the advice 
 of Temple, introduced into it, among many men who en- 
 joyed well merited consideration, others who had acquired 
 their influence in parliament only by intrigue and turbulence. 
 Yet, one of the principal guarantees which Temple had de- 
 sired by this arrangement to give at once to the nation and to 
 the crown, was obtained. The annual revenue of this council, 
 composed of thirty members, equalled the income of all the 
 members of the commons put together. Men possessing such 
 an amount of wealth would not desire a new revolution. 
 
 The king selected from the council a new ministry, a sort 
 of committee, in which matters were to be discussed before 
 they were submitted to the council. The earl of Essex, of a 
 family devoted to the Stuarts, a man to whom the manners 
 of the court were odious, who desired liberty from rational 
 considerations, and who detested Catholicism as incompatible 
 with liberty, was intrusted with the treasury. The earl of 
 Sunderland, a man of known capacity, but better suited to 
 the Cabal ministry than to associate with sir William Temple 
 
138 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1679- 
 
 and the earl of Essex, was made secretary of state; the 
 marquis of Halifax, who, as a bel esprit, professed atheism and 
 republicanism, but who, as a courtier, had always been found 
 ready to oppose the liberty supported by parliament, was 
 summoned to the same committee. Lastly, Shaftesbury, now 
 the idol of the people, was named its president. In the 
 council were to be seen, among those who have been ob- 
 served in this history as distinguishing themselves by their 
 talents or virtues at the head of the parliamentary opposi- 
 tion, lords Eussell and Cavendish, sir William Coventry, sir 
 Francis North, and Edward Seymour. 
 
 This ministerial revolution was rapidly brought about, 
 and at first kept secret, in order that it might produce in 
 the public the effect of an agreeable surprise; but it was 
 very coldly received. The assembled parliament remained 
 silent. It had not charged Danby with deceiving the king, 
 but with serving him too well. Even they, whose friends 
 were to have seats in the new council, did not seem sub- 
 dued by this attempt to ingratiate them; they said that the 
 king would not heed the new ministers, or that he would gain 
 them over to his interests against those of the nation; that 
 nothing but his incapacity to do harm could make sure of 
 him. It was a clear resolution on their part to attack royal 
 power without w ai ting for it to make fresh attempts. 
 
 As a manifesto, the commons issued a declaration concern- 
 ing the duke of York, resolved unanimously in the following 
 terms: " That the duke of York's being a papist, and the 
 hopes of his coming such to the crown, have given the greatest 
 countenance and encouragement to the present conspiracies 
 and designs of the papists against the king and the protestant 
 religion." That was to say, that they desired to exclude the 
 duke of York from his right of succession to the throne. 
 Long since, with different views, the partisans of the duke of 
 Monmouth, the friends of the duchess of Portsmouth, mother 
 of a son for whom her ambition meditated a throne, and 
 lastly, the zealous members of the church of England, had 
 looked forward to the moment when this exclusion might be 
 demanded. At the time the duke made his conversion 
 public, menacing measures warned him that all England 
 rejected him. Parliament, now strong enough to give voice, 
 in the name of all parties, to this sentiment of reprobation, 
 
1680.] THE DUKE OF YORK'S EXCLUSION. 139 
 
 was led away by the energetic party who swayed it, to vote 
 the declaration, and even to permit several members to 
 support it by arguments threatening to royalty. 
 
 In the council, the men who belonged to the opposition 
 urged the king to respond to the appeal of the commons, by 
 himself proposing what should appear calculated to reassure 
 the nation as to the fears inspired by the duke of York. 
 " There were," they said, "two alternatives open; either to 
 exclude the duke altogether, as a papist; or to limit his 
 authority beforehand, so that he could undertake nothing 
 against the religion of the country. If the king did not take 
 the initiative, the commons would anticipate him, and go 
 much further than he would." 
 
 Shaftesbury spoke in favour of the exclusion: " The king," 
 he said, "had a right to disinherit his next heir; it was a 
 right vested in every head of a family, in every person who 
 had property to leave behind him." As it was not from 
 political views, but simply from hatred to the duke of York, 
 that he supported the exclusion, one may suppose that he 
 consciously made this confusion between the laws of succes- 
 sion which govern the family, and those which should 
 govern the state. Lords Sunderland, Essex, and Halifax 
 advocated limitations; the two former, because these appeared 
 to them less opposed to the monarchical principle than ex- 
 clusion; the latter said before the council that, to exclude 
 the duke of York, would be to render the monarchy elective, 
 and to abandon the kingdom to anarchy; but he told his friends 
 that he supported limitations, holding it to be a supreme happi- 
 ness for England to have a popish king, there being no other 
 way to destroy royalty. Temple opposed limitations, with 
 the motives of an honest man. He said, that if the system of 
 limitations was adopted, they would be a salutary check upon 
 a popish successor, but that for the protestant princes who 
 should reign afterwards, they would be equivalent to the de- 
 struction of the royal prerogative. The king concurred 
 with those who, regarding as a misfortune for royalty the ne- 
 cessity of yielding at all to this new encroachment of the 
 commons, out of two concessions, selected that which cost 
 least, and desired the lord chancellor to propose a plan of 
 limitations to parliament. 
 
 These limitations, of all the principles of monarchy, preserved 
 
140 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1679- 
 
 only that of direct inheritance. They left to the duke, should 
 he become king, but a vain title; they conferred on parlia- 
 ment the right of assembling, and of remaining assembled, 
 and of nomination to all the offices, civil, military, and eccle- 
 siastic. The commons were not satisfied with this extra- 
 ordinary offer on the part of Charles. They drew up a bill 
 of exclusion, which declared the duke of York a traitor, if he 
 attempted, after the death of the king, to return to England 
 and assert his title by arms. This bill passed by a consider- 
 able majority. The session continuing, the lower house, besides 
 the bill of exclusion, brought in five bills, stamped with the 
 same hostile character, and which all revived the pretensions 
 of the earlier years of the long parliament: a bill ordering an 
 inquiry to be made as to the members who had sold themselves 
 to the court under the two preceding administrations, the out- 
 line of which strongly resembled the celebrated act against de- 
 linquents; a bill expelling from the house all persons who held 
 salaried offices; a bill ordering the disbanding of the standing 
 army; another regulating the periodical assemblies of the 
 militia, nearly the same with that which Charles I. had 
 refused to sanction ; and lastly, a bill in favour of individual 
 liberty, the famous guarantee of habeas corpus. Since the 
 parliament of 1 668, the proposition of a measure of this kind 
 against arbitrary imprisonments had reappeared every session, 
 always opposed, and each time improved in its character. 
 This session it passed the houses, and only awaited the royal 
 sanction. 
 
 While discussing these various measures, which brought 
 back monarchy to the battle field on which it had already 
 succumbed, the commons warmly pressed forward the trial of 
 the papist lords in the Tower, and persisted in demanding 
 that the upper house should declare invalid the pardon given 
 to Danby. This demand was more especially opposed by the 
 spiritual peers, who had a lively recollection of the support 
 which they had accorded to Danby. The presbyterians of 
 the lower house did not fail to take advantage of this oppor- 
 tunity of attacking episcopacy. They represented to the lords, 
 on the strength of numerous precedents, that the bishops 
 sitting among them could not vote in the trial of Danby, and 
 ought to remain away from the house until that affair was ter- 
 minated. The lords, by a small majority, refused to sanction 
 
1680.] RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES. 141 
 
 this exclusion. The commons declared that if the bishops 
 were allowed to vote, they would suspend their labours. The 
 king hastened to take advantage of this new r dispute between 
 the two houses, not to prorogue, but to dissolve parliament. 
 Most of the revolutionary bills then under discussion, waited 
 a second or third reading: there were but two exceptions: the 
 disbanding of the troops bill had passed, the king having had 
 to choose between the advantage of retaining them, and that 
 of receiving a subsidy of 20,000/. The law of habeas cGrpus 
 also had passed. 
 
 The new revolutionary movement was not arrested in its 
 course by the loss of its great political arena: it made its way 
 through all the paths which remained open to it. The pul- 
 pits resounded with sermons in which the Jesuit maxims 
 which appeared to have been put into practice in the popish 
 plot, were held up to public horror and contempt. The 
 courts of justice witnessed the inveteracy of the judges 
 against the victims of this atrocious tale, and the fierce applause 
 of the public at each fresh condemation. Five Jesuits were 
 put to death; after them was executed Langhorne, a learned 
 lawyer, whose crime was the having professionally assisted 
 papists in several prosecutions against them. . The press, 
 again become free by the dissolution of parliament, increased 
 this overflow of passions. A multitude of pamphlets ap- 
 peared, in which the members of the opposition, some of 
 them with formidable talent, discussed the question of the 
 exclusion of the duke of York, and the extent of the royal- 
 prerogative. The presbyterians, in other publications, attacked 
 episcopacy, mixing it despite itself, in the counter-revolution. 
 The court had no partisans w^ho dared to reply: the bishops,, 
 however, did not remain silent. They sent forth, under the 
 title of the Observer, a journal almost entirely filled with 
 recriminations against the dissenting protestants. The latter 
 reproached them with selling themselves to power, and with 
 aiding to fetter liberty, in order to preserve their honours 
 and their immense wealth; they retaliated upon the presby- 
 terians with a retrospect of the excesses committed by their 
 sect when it was dominant, and denounced their principles as 
 subversive of the existing order of things. 
 
 The episcopalians, during these disputes, were furnished 
 wâth a terrible argument against their adversaries. The dis- 
 
142 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1680- 
 
 banding of the troops having once again given the Scots time 
 to breathe, and Lauderdale having shared the disgrace of 
 Danby, the Scottish presbyterians had obtained from a new- 
 administration more toleration, and had immediately resumed 
 their assemblies, called conventicles. Some of them, repairing 
 to an assembly of this kind, met the carriage of that Sharp, 
 who, for fifteen years, had so cruelly tyrannized over them. 
 Sharp expired under their blows. The murderers and some 
 ministers who had excited them to the deed, as an act of 
 vengeance agreeable to God, created an insurrection near 
 Glasgow; many thousands of presbyterians hastened to their 
 call, scantily armed and clothed, but animated by the belief 
 that the triumph of Christ, expected during the long days of 
 oppression, had at length arrived. They proclaimed the 
 covenant, and, repulsing some companies of guards sent to 
 disperse them, marched on at hazard, summoning all the 
 presbyterians to join them, and demanding the convocation of 
 a free parliament. The duke of Monmouth was sent in all 
 haste against the insurgents, with some troops collected in the 
 north of England; he attacked them at Bothwell bridge on 
 the Clyde, not far from the little town of Hamilton. They 
 scarcely resisted. The duke commiserated their fanaticism, 
 and spared them; a few ministers only, the leaders of the 
 revolt, were hanged; as intrepid on the scaffold as they had 
 been cowardly on the field, they died without acknowledging 
 the authority of the king. 
 
 The duke, returning to London, obtained with difficulty a 
 pardon for the insurgents. The king was displeased that he had 
 prevented the victorious troops from massacring the fugitives, 
 and taken such care of the prisoners. The duke nobly replied, 
 that if the object was to kill defenceless men in cold blood, 
 a butcher would have been more suitable than he. Entrusted 
 with securing the future submission of the country, he con- 
 tinued to act with that moderation which procured him many 
 partisans in Scotland and in England. In a short time he 
 effected, by gentleness, what none of the administrators who 
 had followed each other in Scotland since the restoration, had 
 been able to do. He regulated the dissenting assemblies in 
 such a manner, that there was no need either absolutely to 
 authorize them or to prohibit them. The attempt of the in- 
 surgents, defeated at Bothwell bridge, happened at the moment 
 
1681.] York's rising influence over the king. 143 
 
 when the court party, long stunned by the blow inflicted upon 
 it by the popish plot, had recourse, in order to renew the com- 
 bat, to the press. The writers of this party did not fail to 
 connect the Scottish revolt with the system of revolutionary 
 attacks favoured by the existing tendency of the public mind. 
 This tendency, essentially bound up with the great danger 
 which had given it birth, was sustained by the fear of what 
 the reign of the duke of York might have in reserve, but was 
 not what the republicans fancied it to be. Although the mass 
 of the nation allowed itself to be led by them, it had not, like 
 them, any fixed resolution. Already seeing the episcopalians 
 attach themselves to the king, because, like him, they were 
 menaced by the presbyterians, it did not clearly perceive what 
 might be the result of a sudden subversion of the existing 
 state of things. All its doubts became manifest when an 
 illness threatened abruptly to carry off Charles II. If he 
 dies, said they, the duke of York will reign, and with him 
 the papist faction thirsting for vengeance. If the duke be 
 excluded, who will reign? his daughter, or one of the king's 
 natural sons? As to the republic, it can only establish 
 itself by exterminating the whole of its adversaries in the 
 order of bishops and in the house of lords. The king, how- 
 ever, recovered, and the joy excited, under these feelings, 
 was as general as it was misconceived by him who occasioned 
 it. 
 
 During the king's illness, the duke of York came secretly 
 to London. The deep depression into which he found his 
 brother plunged, the result of such infinite humiliations and 
 miscalculations, entitled him, he considered, to represent that, 
 if his counsels had been followed, the revolutionary party 
 would never have arrived at this degree of audacity. The 
 duke described parliament and the council formed under the 
 advice of Temple as a set of factious persons whom the king 
 ought at once to dismiss. The real opinion of England was, 
 he said, that which expressed itself in the anxiety, so general 
 and so vivid, for the menaced life of the king. The proper 
 course, he urged, was to dissolve the council, to defer, as long 
 as possible, the assembling of a new parliament, and sincerely 
 to renew relations with Louis XIV. The king determined 
 upon adopting this advice, and here commenced the ascendancy 
 which the duke afterwards exercised over him. He did not 
 
144 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1680- 
 
 as yet allow him to remain in England, but he dismissed him 
 with the promise that parliament should not be called for a 
 year, and that the government of Scotland should be taken 
 from the duke of Monmouth, the chief of a considerable party 
 among those whom the terror of popery did not carry so far 
 as to desire the subversion of royalty. These numerous ene- 
 mies of the duke of York, justifying the national anxiety 
 when the death of the king seemed certain, were on the point 
 of dividing, some projecting to have Monmouth crowned, 
 others to proclaim the duke of Richmond, son of the duchess 
 of Portsmouth, others to call in the son-in-law and daughter 
 of the duke of York. The republicans, on their side, were 
 actively bestirring themselves to secure the triumph of their 
 views. It was even supposed that, favoured by the general con- 
 fusion, one of these various parties had attempted to get pos- 
 session of the Tower of London and the principal posts of the 
 city. The recovery of the king disconcerting all their hopes, 
 they reverted to their point of separation, resuming re- 
 luctantly the legal path by which the mass of the nation 
 desired to arrive at the destruction of popery, and to save 
 itself from the vengeance of the duke of York. 
 
 The king regained courage at the joyful acclamations 
 which greeted his recovery. Had he comprehended their 
 real import, he would have adhered firmly to the counsels of 
 Temple. An invincible fatality, or rather the consciousness 
 of the wrongs he had inflicted on the nation, induced him to 
 prefer the course traced out by the duke of York. Temple, 
 Shaftesbury, Essex, and Halifax retired, after having vainly 
 solicited the convocation of a parliament. The council, no 
 longer consulted, ceased to assemble. Sunderland remained 
 minister; Laurence Hyde, son of Clarendon, and lord Go- 
 dolphin, who had been employed in the treasury, under lord 
 Essex, replaced, the one the latter minister, the other lord 
 Halifax, and encouraged the king in his resolution not to 
 assemble parliament. But the religious and political writings 
 against popery and arbitrary power surpassed in violence 
 anything that parliament could have said. The court answered 
 with other writings, which also found readers. The bishops 
 supported with still greater advantage the interests they had 
 in common with royalty, which saw in their diversion against 
 the revolutionary party a most useful exercise of the time 
 
1681. ] DIVISION OF PARTIES. 145 
 
 gained by the prorogation of parliament. The latter party 
 accordingly loudly demanded a session. It circulated through- 
 out the kingdom petitions demanding a parliament. The 
 court hawked about others, which left everything to the wis- 
 dom of the king. They who signed or approved the former 
 took the name of petitioners ; the latter called themselves 
 abhorrers. These denominations were shortly superseded by 
 terms of reproach, whigs, or presbyterian robbers, tories, or 
 papist robbers, exchanged between the two parties, and which, 
 afterwards accepted by them, have existed in England, attached 
 to the two great interests that still divide her politics. 
 
 It is worthy of remark, that the superiority of number of 
 the petitioners over that of the abhorrers was not so great as 
 the court might have apprehended, or its enemies hoped; but 
 the explanation of the general joy at the recovery of the 
 king explains this also. The action of the various parties 
 armed against popery became more and more divergent. 
 London, which contained the greatest amount of democratic 
 elements, appointed to the important office of sheriff two 
 enthusiastic republicans, Cornish and Bethell, who would 
 naturally introduce other republicans into office, wherever 
 their influence prevailed. The bishops, at the same time, 
 spoke of expurgating the lower clergy, composed partly 
 of old presbyterians. The provinces were at once agitated 
 hy preparations for the elections, which, it was said, were 
 approaching, and by the triumphal progress of the duke of 
 Monmouth, recalled from Scotland, in accordance with the 
 promise given to the duke of York. All this disorder brought 
 back among the labouring classes, who had no other ambition 
 than that of living quietly and in comfort, the anxious doubts 
 and fears which, heretofore, the result of similar excitement, 
 had favoured the return of the Stuarts. Hatred of popery 
 was the predominant feeling with the citizen class, and had, 
 for a while, rendered it capable of the blindest fanaticism; 
 but the great lords and large landed proprietors, who, in the 
 affair of the plot, had placed themselves at its head, proposed 
 applying the victory to other purposes, and this did not 
 escape its observation. Among the leaders of the opposition 
 in the upper house, many had family and social connexions 
 with the court, which they made use of for the promotion of 
 unavowed objects, perhaps for the general interest, but by 
 
 L 
 
146 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1680— 
 
 the medium, ever liable to suspicion, of intrigue. Men were 
 not sure of their intentions until they proclaimed them openly 
 in parliament. It was the same with the members of the 
 commons, when, in the interval of the sessions, they sought 
 to arouse public opinion by secret dealings. Burnet, the 
 historian, who has best painted this epoch, observes, that the 
 members of the commons who, during the prorogations so 
 frequent since the popish plot, though discontented with the 
 court, remained calm and silent, avoiding the clubs and 
 tumultuous assemblies, at the reopening of parliament pre- 
 sented themselves with much more effect upon the public 
 mind than they who, busied in intrigue, had created doubts 
 of their intentions. The people, he adds, were very eager for 
 remedies applied by parliament, but alarmed at all others. 
 
 At the close of the year 1680, the convocation of a new- 
 parliament gave regularity to the previously tumultuous ex- 
 pression of the popular anxiety. Charles, after succeeding 
 with great difficulty in keeping parliament in abeyance for 
 nearly a year, had descended to the most despicably base 
 supplications to obtain from Louis XIV. the means of extend- 
 ing this prorogation to the time fixed by the triennial act. 
 But Louis, being willing to grant only three millions of livres, 
 instead of the fourteen millions he demanded, the negotiation 
 had been broken off; and Charles had announced in a threatening 
 tone that he would make matters up with his people. Now 
 this was no longer in his power. The same deputies, every- 
 where re-elected, returned irritated by the efforts which had 
 been made to exclude them, and by the expenses which 
 travelling and their elections had occasioned them. The 
 king had thought it advisable, at the period of the meeting 
 of parliament, to send his brother into Scotland. He then 
 addressed the two houses as a man recovered from his fears, 
 but yet disposed to make important concessions, in order to 
 put an end to existing disputes. He announced that he was 
 willing to insure security to the religion of the church of 
 England after his death, but that he would not permit them 
 to deprive his brother of a sacred right. In taking this tone, 
 Charles thought that he might reckon upon a majority in the 
 upper house, and in the nation upon all who had rejoiced at 
 his recovery. There was some basis for this hope in the 
 hesitation manifested since the last parliament; but all de- 
 
1681.] THE MEAL TUB PLOT. 147 
 
 pended on what should be done in the present session by 
 the party, long mixed up in the ranks of the opposition, but 
 which had placed itself at its head in the crisis of the popish 
 plot. 
 
 This party, misconceiving the nature of the aid lent to it 
 by the recent public alarm, continued to march onward. It 
 was predominant in the commons, whence all its attacks pro- 
 ceeded. In the first place, the majority of the lower house 
 expressed its dissatisfaction that an entire year had elapsed 
 since the last session. This led it to the affair of the petitions 
 about the convocation. It declared that the petitioners had 
 deserved well of their country; then,, in order to prove that 
 the abhorrers, notwithstanding their number, were men 
 suborned by the court, it appointed a special committee to 
 prosecute, in the house and out of doors, all those who had 
 defended the royal prerogative. A member of the commons, 
 sir Thomas Withens, was expelled for having signed a 
 counter petition. A complaint was drawn up against several 
 lords of the court party, who had exerted themselves to 
 increase the number of the abhorrer signatures; the re- 
 corder of London, the afterwards infamous sir George 
 Jeffreys, attacked for the same offence, concealed himself. In 
 the provinces, in contempt of the Habeas corpus act, the 
 agents of the committee imprisoned a number of abhorrers, 
 most of them wholly unconnected with the court, and known 
 by their neighbours to be men incapable of being seduced by 
 it. Accordingly, the first of them who resisted, an in- 
 habitant of Exeter, had all moderate men with him; there 
 was a general outcry against tyranny, and the committee 
 desisted from its prosecution of the abhorrers. 
 
 The lower house fell back upon the popish plot, renewed 
 its declaration as to its enduring existence, and expelled two 
 members who had ventured to speak of it as an absurd 
 fiction, and to say that, on the contrary, there was a presby- 
 terian plot. These members alluded to the denunciation of 
 what was called the Meal Tub plot, a denunciation made 
 some months before, by one Dangerfield, a man even less 
 worthy of belief than Oates or Bedloe. He pretended that he 
 had found in a tub of meal a series of letters written by 
 presbyterians concerning a project to assassinate the king and 
 exclude the reigning family. He produced these letters, 
 
 l2 
 
148 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1680- 
 
 which the court affected to regard as authentic. The com- 
 mons summoned Dangerfield to their bar; he, determined 
 to make his fortune out of one party or the other, and 
 finding that he had been too hasty in his choice, declared that 
 he had been paid by the court to fabricate the letters alleged 
 to be presbyterian, and that he knew things which would 
 confirm what Gates, Bedloe, and the other informers had 
 deposed. Dangerfield was applauded by the commons, who, 
 mingling contempt with audacity, recommended him to the 
 king as a faithful subject, worthy of his favours. They also 
 prayed him to think of doctor Tongue for one of the first 
 ecclesiastical dignities that should fall vacant. 
 
 The bill of exclusion was again brought forward, and gave 
 rise to a discussion, in which much learning and talent were 
 displayed on either side, but which was more especially re- 
 markable for the almost republican profession of faith into 
 which the partisans of exclusion allowed themselves to be led 
 by their adversaries. 
 
 The former, by a great majority, had passed the bill, which 
 was drawn up in violent language, and fortified by two 
 additional articles, one enacting that the act should be read 
 twice a year to the people in the churches; the other, that any 
 interposition in favour of the rights of the duke of York should 
 be high treason. The opponents of the bill, hitherto impatiently 
 listened to, demanded that it should be expressly specified 
 that, the duke being excluded, his daughters alone could be 
 called to reign in his stead. The excluders rejected the 
 objection as futile, it being well understood, they said, that, 
 the duke once considered as dead, his children would naturally 
 succeed him. The others pressed them at least to notify this 
 explanation ; but they would not. This gave reason to suppose 
 that they intended to discard not only the duke, but his 
 family also, and that they were labouring for the duke of 
 Monmouth, or, more generally, for a republic. This last 
 effort of the opponents of the bill in the lower house, by 
 exhibiting its true character, was not thrown away; the upper 
 house threw out the bill on the first reading. 
 
 The commons revenged themselves by refusing to vote 
 pressing subsidies, a plan which had so often answered their 
 purpose; but as to this refusal they joined a vote, declaring 
 illegal any anticipation of any branch of the revenue what- 
 
1681.] EXECUTION OF LORD STAFFORD. 149 
 
 ever, and making it high treason to advance money to the 
 king upon subsidies which might thereafter be granted, the 
 measure assumed an appearance of injustice. Many gave 
 this new act of violence an interpretation alarming to those 
 who did not desire to subvert the reigning family. " To 
 deprive the king," said they, " even of the resources which he 
 has always procured in similar cases on his own credit, is to 
 attempt to take him by famine." However, as the king was 
 surrounded by necessitous courtiers, who urged him to do 
 anything to obtain subsidies, and represented to him that his 
 father had succumbed for want of a few thousand pounds, he 
 consented to a new plan of conciliation, upon which the 
 ministers had several conferences with the leaders of the 
 opposition, and which consisted in keeping the duke at least 
 five hundred miles from England so long as the king lived, 
 and to admit him to the succession with the limitations already 
 proposed. Essex, in the name of the opposition peers, de- 
 manded that the king should place in the custody of an asso- 
 ciation, formed to guarantee the limitation, several fortresses, 
 which so alarmed the king that he would listen no further to 
 a compromise. 
 
 While this was secretly in agitation, the lords, in order to 
 prove that their conduct in the affair of the bill of exclusion 
 did not arise from any partiality for popery, disgraced them- 
 selves by the prosecution of the venerable earl of Stafford, the 
 last victim of the impostures of Oates. Fifty votes to thirty 
 carried, amid the applause of the commons, a condemnation to 
 death, in which there was neither justice nor passion. The 
 bishops, the lords, who were again drawing round the king, 
 the king himself, desired, by sacrificing upon the most palpably 
 false accusations one of the oldest royalists in England, to 
 prove their aversion for popery, and to make their court to 
 the nation and to the commons. The people of London re- 
 pudiated the share of enthusiasm which it was desired to 
 communicate to them upon the occasion of this vile deed. 
 "When the old earl, about to yield his white head to the axe 
 of the executioner, protested, in an affecting tone, that he 
 died innocent, there was a universal cry: " We believe you, 
 my lord, we believe you; Heaven bless you!" and sobs inter- 
 rupted their heart-rending farewell. 
 
 The blood of the earl of Stafford was the last shed for the 
 
150 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1680- 
 
 popish plot. With the nation, the power of this phrenetic 
 fiction had reached its term. The political party and the 
 religious sect, whom the anti -popish outbreak had armed 
 against royalty, ceasing to shield themselves behind an idea 
 which was no longer dominant, and furnished only futile 
 pretexts for their attacks, sought less and less to disguise the 
 special views which tended to isolate them. The majority 
 of the commons, blind to the apprehensions which it was 
 diffusing around it, continued to labour at a new revolution. 
 A proposition often made without success, when the members 
 of the church of England had recourse to oppression in order 
 to strengthen their position, that of uniting by compromise 
 the two churches, the English and the presbyterian, was 
 renewed, with the consent of the court, by its friends in the 
 lower house. The presbyterians took no interest in the 
 motion, as though they looked upon themselves as about to 
 reign in their turn. They did not desire to have their present 
 position accommodated to the severe laws of the nonconfor- 
 mists, but to have these laws readjusted to the preponderance 
 which they regarded themselves as having now decidedly 
 acquired. They accordingly carried a bill enacting that the 
 laws against the nonconformists could only be put in force 
 against papists, and should be of no avail as to protestant 
 nonconformists. The lower house voted, by a large majority, 
 the repeal of these laws, made by a church-of-England 
 parliament, and under cover of which was effected the re- 
 generation of a national opposition. 
 
 Charles II. calmly observed these attacks upon the religion 
 of the state, and saw clearly enough that their inevitable effect 
 would be to bring him back numerous partisans. He syste- 
 matically limited his resistance to the attacks of the domi- 
 nant party to the interests of his royal prerogative, and sent 
 message upon message for a subsidy. The danger which 
 threatened Tangier was put forward as a pretext, futile 
 enough for this urgent pertinacity; and the commons answered: 
 It is better for Tangier to fall into the hands of the king of 
 Fez, than that it serve to discipline papist troops. The grand- 
 son of the famous Hampden went so far as to say: " The 
 duke of York is admiral of Tangier, and therefore we prefer 
 that Tangier be abandoned." The refusals of Louis XIV. 
 
1681.] 
 
 AFFAIR OF FITZHARRIS. 
 
 loi 
 
 were less humiliating than this; Charles preferred again to 
 expose himself to them, and dissolved parliament. 
 
 Shortly before this new dissolution, a member of the com- 
 mons, named Leveson Gower, had ventured to propose the an- 
 ticipating him, by inviting the house to separate of itself. " I 
 move," said he, " that we withdraw; let us return to our 
 counties; let us make the people acquainted with the manner 
 in which their representatives are treated. Our cause is theirs; 
 they will maintain it by the sword, and we will show the 
 duke that we defy him and his papists." The duke was then 
 in Scotland; he also would willingly have referred to the 
 chance of arms the question of his right to the throne, ill 
 defended, according to him, by the ever doubtful friendship 
 of the king his brother; he earnestly desired civil war, hoping 
 everything from the military renown which he founded on a 
 few flattering phrases from Turenne, and upon the testimony 
 given to his prowess by the old cavaliers. After the disso- 
 lution of parliament, he wrote to Charles: " The moment is 
 come to be truly king or to perish; no more parliaments; it 
 is to France you must have recourse for subsidies." 
 
 Charles consented that his brother should negotiate with 
 Louis XIV., and he himself set to work; but neither of them 
 succeeded. During these futile intrigues, the press hurled a 
 storm of abusive pamphlets against the court. The king 
 desired to proceed with severity against the printers and 
 authors; he had several of them tried, but the jurors, drawn 
 from among the whigs, acquitted them, with the exception 
 of an Irishman, named Fitzharris. This man confessed him- 
 self the author of a publication in which the king and the 
 duke of York were attacked with such violence, that it 
 seemed as though its real aim was to render the excluders 
 odious. Fitzharris, seeing that they were disposed to treat 
 him severely, did not hesitate to say that the book had been, 
 in fact, commanded by the court; he represented himself as 
 one of the instruments of the papists, and gave a new version 
 of the famous plot, which he concluded by declaring that the 
 duke of York had been acquainted with all the various pro- 
 jects, from that of the burning of London to the plot against 
 the life of the king, and that he was concerned in the death 
 of Godfrey. 
 
 The king, despite the 
 
 vehement remonstrances of the 
 
152 HISTORY OP THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 duke's enemies, sent Fitzharris to the Tower; his object was 
 to suppress the affair, decided as he was upon incurring the 
 risk of a new general election. The last session had taught 
 him that his fears as to the revolutionary tendency of the 
 commons were now shared by the upper house. He thought 
 also that by removing the new parliament from the influence 
 of London, he should greatly diminish the audacity of the 
 commons. He accordingly summoned the houses to Oxford. 
 The elections returned in a majority the partisans of ex- 
 clusion. London, in re-electing its late representatives, 
 thanked them for the conduct they had observed in the affair of 
 the papists, and of the bill of exclusion. A petition, signed 
 by the duke of Monmouth and by fifteen peers, now agitated 
 the public mind, by protesting against the ordinance which 
 summoned the houses to Oxford. It was in every one's 
 mouth, exaggerating the fears expressed in this petition, that 
 the court was collecting the members at Oxford in order to 
 have them assassinated by the papists and the soldiers of the 
 guard. Several thousand citizens, excited by this idea, fol- 
 lowed their deputies to Oxford; they were armed, and on 
 their hats bore ribbons, with the menacing device: No slavery! 
 Ko popery! The king, on his side, arrived with a numerous 
 guard, which, by its strict discipline, presented a striking 
 contrast with the tumultuous concourse of electors and people 
 of all classes, who had flocked thither, says an historian, less 
 as to a regular meeting of parliament than to a Polish diet. 
 
 The king opened the session by renewing the protestations 
 of his attachment to religion and to the constitution of the 
 state. He recapitulated all he had done in the past three 
 years, to satisfy those who seemed to suspect his intentions. 
 He took the whole universe to witness that he had neglected 
 nothing to maintain the public safety, and this so prompt con- 
 vocation of parliament was, he said, a new proof of the reli- 
 gious care he applied to the fulfilment of his obligations. 
 There was in his words a solemnity, a tone of conviction, 
 wholly unusual with him, and which seemed to announce that 
 in his opinion some great event was about to be accomplished. 
 The commons received this grave discourse as a menace, and 
 replied that peace with them was impossible, unless upon the 
 acceptation of the bill of exclusion; they alleged, as necessarily 
 strengthening their perseverance, the new depositions made 
 
1682.] THE PARLIAMENT OF OXFORD. 153 
 
 by Fitzharris, against whom they constituted themselves 
 plaintiffs, and demanded that he should be brought to trial 
 before the upper house. The majority of the lords, con- 
 sidering that it would be inconvenient or dangerous to give 
 much notoriety to the proceedings of a man determined to 
 defend himself by such daring inculpations, would not try 
 Fitzharris. The refusal of the lords was treated by the com- 
 mons as a denial of justice. They declared a traitor to the 
 public liberties any one who should concur in trying Fitzharris 
 by any other court than the house of lords. The incitements 
 to civil w^ar, which had terminated the last session, were again 
 heard, and were this time so much the more dangerous, that 
 the royal troops on the one hand, menacing despite their 
 strict discipline, and the most inveterate enemies of arbitrary 
 power and of popery, on the other, were now in presence of 
 each other, and, as it were, in the lists. Oxford, crowded 
 with the numerous adherents of the commons, and of the 
 minority of the lords, became the arena of scenes which might 
 easily be followed by a general conflagration. In the danger, 
 the king had himself carried to the upper house, alone in his 
 chair, with the crown in a basket between his legs; he hastily 
 put on the royal robes, summoned the commons, dissolved 
 parliament, and immediately quitted Oxford, followed by his 
 guards. 
 
 That which passed with the throng of men who had hastened 
 to attend the debates at Oxford, and, as they said, to protect 
 their representatives against the poniard of the papists and of 
 the satellites of the court, showed the king that he had gained 
 a signal victory. Lords, commons, citizens, quitted Oxford 
 with such precipitation, that in a few hours the city, of late 
 so agitated and so noisy, became silent and solitary. Those 
 who had set out from London with so threatening an air, and 
 apparently so determined to use their weapons, returned 
 thither cautious and crest-fallen. It was thus with all those 
 who, having surpassed their fellows in professions of courage 
 and fierce animosity, had given way at the moment of surprise 
 caused by the sudden resolution of the king, and in abandon- 
 ing the cause of parliament had not even thought of pro- 
 testing. All the shiftings of public opinion with regard to 
 the party whom the popish plot had rendered so formidable 
 to the counter-revolution, became fixed from the moment 
 
154 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION, [1681- 
 
 it was proved that the force of that party was not in propor- 
 tion with its pretensions. It had compromised resistance by 
 taking, in the name of all, the offensive. It had treated as 
 enemies those who, from reason or from personal calculation, 
 had separated from it, and even in the eyes of those who, at 
 a distance, had followed it, disposed to profit by the victory, 
 had it gained one, its temerities became crimes. 
 
1682.] 
 
 DECLARATION OF OXFORD. 
 
 155 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 ROYALIST REACTION. 
 
 Effects of tlie declaration of Oxford — General outbreak of the catholics, 
 the royalists, the members of the church of England, and the commer- 
 cial population against the whigs — The duke of York in favour — Direc- 
 tion given by him to the reaction in Scotland — He solicits and obtains 
 permission to return to England — His influence in the council — Affair 
 of the sheriffs of London — Attacks on the charters of the towns and 
 corporations — Prosecutions of the excluders and the whigs throughout 
 the kingdom — Persecutions of the presbyterians in Scotland — Conspiracy 
 of the whigs of England and the presbyterians of Scotland — Discovery 
 of the conspiracy — Trials and death of the chief conspirators — Indiffer- 
 ence of the nation — Results of the Anglo- Scottish plot favourable to the 
 court, especially to the duke of York, and the papists. 
 
 The dissolution of the parliament of Oxford was promptly 
 followed by a manifesto addressed to the nation by the king. 
 Taking credit to himself for all the moderation, throwing all 
 the fault upon the parliament, he gave an account to England 
 of what had passed: " We offered to concur in any remedies 
 that could be proposed for the security of the protestant reli- 
 gion, and to preserve the liberty and property of our subjects 
 at home, and to supporting our neighbours and allies abroad, 
 to all which we have met with most unsuitable returns from 
 the house of commons. But for all this, we are resolved, by 
 the blessing of God, to have frequent parliaments, and both 
 in and out of parliament to use our utmost efforts to extirpate 
 popery, and to redress all the grievances of our good subjects, 
 and in all things to govern according to the laws of the king- 
 dom." The effect produced by this manifesto is one of the 
 
156 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 gravest subjects for meditation presented by this history. 
 The violent rupture of Oxford all at once turned to the profit 
 of the court. Without intrigues, without a struggle, from a 
 simple displacing of those immense forces which the exclusion 
 party had not been able to conduct to the point of civil war, 
 royalty, just before about to succumb, again became all- 
 powerful, and its adversaries lost even their existence as a 
 party. Every class of interests, all shades of opinion, united 
 in the desire to avert civil war, to put an end to a state 
 of agitation which must lead to it, accepted the new pro- 
 mises of the king, if not as a guarantee for liberty, at least 
 as so much time gained. All those who from principle, 
 passion, or interest, did not allow themselves to be led away 
 by this general movement, were fain to conceal themselves or 
 remain silent; the only class which adhered to them being the 
 lowest ranks of the populace. 
 
 The high clergy had been threatened as well as the court; 
 it looked upon this victory as its own; it had the king's 
 manifesto read to the people in all the churches, and declaimed 
 from the pulpits against those who, under the pretext of 
 combating popery, had desired to bring back the revolu- 
 tionary regime. Addresses in reply to the declaration came 
 from all parts of the kingdom: the grand juries, the quarter- 
 sessions, cities, boroughs, corporations, hastened to declare 
 their adhesion to the great change which had just taken 
 place. Some of the addresses confined themselves to the 
 expression of their confidence in the good intentions of the 
 king, others congratulated him on his frank reconciliation with 
 the church of England; but the majority were a condemna- 
 tion of the principles upon which it had been attempted to 
 exclude the duke of York; some of the most energetic de- 
 nounced the acts of the two last parliaments as rebellion; 
 some went so far as to demand that the penal laws should be 
 put in force against the nonconforming protestants ; the 
 addresses of the old cavalier party were either ridiculous 
 rhodomontade, or an apology for all that the royal government 
 had done against the principles of the revolution. Most of 
 the citizens who presented their addresses were made knights. 
 They gave one another banquets, at which they drank with 
 vehement enthusiasm the health of the king and the duke of 
 
1682.J GROWING TRIUMPH OF ROYALTY. 15? 
 
 York; as to popery, there was now no more said about it, 
 than though it had never inspired a fear in England. 
 . The counter-revolution was thus almost again at its starting 
 point, armed with the same forces which the church of 
 England and the interests of the middle classes had given it 
 in the early years of Clarendon's ministry. We shall see it 
 again rapidly traverse all the phases it had slowly gone 
 through between that ministry and the popish plot, which had 
 almost overwhelmed it. The last parliament of Westminster 
 had not been able to repeal the laws against the nonconform- 
 ing protestants; these were again put in force; first, in the 
 country: in London, the persecution was not then begun, 
 because the sheriffs, nominated in place of Bethell and Cornish, 
 at the end of 1680, that is to say, before the dissolution of 
 the parliament of Oxford, were whigs; with them the Lon- 
 don magistrates and jurors were whigs also. Fitzharris, 
 however, no longer supported by the commons, was condemned 
 by an ordinary court. He would willingly have retracted 
 his first depositions, but he was so evidently the author of the 
 book, and attacks upon the royal family had become so great 
 a crime, that the judges dared not acquit him; he was exe- 
 cuted. The other informers were more successful in adopting 
 the change which had taken place, and now talked of revolu- 
 tionary plots. Dugdale and Tuberville, two of the witnesses 
 who had caused the condemnation of the venerable Stafford, 
 declared that a plot had been formed at Oxford by the ex- 
 cluders against the life of the king, and that a joiner, named 
 College, was one of the conspirators. This College, indeed, 
 was one of those who had escorted the London members to 
 Oxford, and had exhibited peculiar exasperation against the 
 king, the duke of York, and the papists; but beyond this 
 nothing was alleged against him which was not manifestly 
 false. The grand jury, composed of whigs, ignored the 
 indictment. The court was very angry at this, but as Oxford 
 was the place where the conspiracy, as they said, had been 
 planned, there was a law which allowed the accused to be 
 again taken before a jury in that city, which was accordingly 
 done. The Oxford jury received the depositions of Dugdale 
 and Tuberville, and resting on the frightful precedents created 
 by the late parliaments and the courts of London in their 
 
158 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 iniquitous proceedings against the papists, condemned College, 
 who died with great firmness. Other depositions gave a pre- 
 text for arresting Shaftesbury; the closest search, however, 
 made in his house, furnished no other evidence than a written 
 project of an association against the duke of York, and even 
 this was not in the earl's own hand; the grand jury, as in the 
 case of College, ignored the indictment. Shaftesbury quitted 
 the Tower amid the rejoicings of the people, to whom his 
 turbulence endeared him. 
 
 This second declaration of ignoramus by the grand jury, 
 showed the victorious party that until the expiration of the 
 term of the then sheriffs, magistrates, and jurors of the whig 
 party, it would be impossible to take any effectual steps in 
 London; the remainder of the year 1681 was in England, 
 therefore, employed in preparing acts of vengeance for the 
 time when these obstacles should no longer present them- 
 selves. In Scotland, meanwhile, the duke of York, invested 
 with full power, secretly resumed the work of the counter- 
 revolution, as he conceived it, so as to act at once upon both 
 kingdoms. Succeeding the duke of Monmouth, who was 
 universally beloved, he was anxious to exhibit as a statesman 
 that capacity which he thought he had given sufficient proof 
 of as a general and as a naval commander. In assuming the 
 direction of the affairs of Scotland, he at first affected mode- 
 ration; but at a very early period an occasion presented 
 itself for displaying severity; he was then pitiless. A few 
 hundred presbyterians, under the conduct of two ministers, 
 Cameron and Cargill, having taken arms and declared that 
 they would acknowledge neither the king nor the bishops, he 
 sent the troops against them. The insurgents, who called 
 themselves Cargillites and Cameronians, were beaten, and a 
 great number of them killed; the prisoners, taken to Edin- 
 burgh, were tortured and put to death. The duke was pre- 
 sent at the executions, which he witnessed with an unmoved 
 countenance, and as though they were curious experiments. 
 The news of the dissolution of parliament reached him in the 
 midst of these scenes. He was overjoyed; he addressed the 
 warmest congratulations to his brother, recommending him to 
 distrust those who should wish him to assemble a new par- 
 liament in England, and asked his authority to convoke 
 one in Scotland. He should be able, he said, to manage it 
 
1682.] CONVOCATION OF THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT. 159 
 
 thoroughly, and by it get rid legally of all that the factious 
 parliaments of England had done. 
 
 Charles approved of this idea, and the duke convoked the 
 parliament of Scotland, proposing to appear there as commis- 
 sioner for his brother. The Scottish parliament was not 
 composed, like that of England, of two chambers, but of one 
 only, in which the bishops sat with the lords and the com- 
 mons. Here the dangerous tumult of general discussions was 
 unknown. The various questions were discussed by a com- 
 mittee called the lords of the articles, composed of eight spiri- 
 tual lords, eight temporal lords, and eight members of the 
 commons, nominated by the sixteen members of the two first 
 orders; the remainder of the assembly merely sanctioned or 
 rejected the decisions of this high committee. Lauderdale, 
 during his horrible tyranny, had always the lords of the 
 articles at his disposal, because in that country the episcopal 
 religion, ever in a state of hostility against an entirely 
 presbyterian national majority, had remained what the Eng- 
 lish church had been in England during the early years of 
 the restoration, and what it had again become by the event of 
 Oxford, that is to say, a blind instrument of the passions of 
 royalty. 
 
 The duke was reasonably assured of being able to direct 
 the lords of the articles at his will. Still there were in that 
 committee powerful men, of high character, rather English 
 than Scottish in their opinions, and whose destruction, at 
 whatever cost, entered into his plans: the duke of Hamilton, 
 and the earl of Argyle, son of him who died on the scaffold, 
 shortly after the restoration, were especially odious to him, 
 because, as he said, they were too wealthy for subjects. 
 These two noblemen were not ignorant how dangerous their 
 wealth was to them at this juncture. They accordingly 
 conducted themselves in the manner which seemed best cal- 
 culated to overcome the envious reserve with which the duke 
 treated them. They opposed those who disputed his right, 
 as a papist, to fulfil the functions of the king's commissioner; 
 he mistook this complaisance for fear, and in his opening 
 speech to parliament, it was well understood that he pointed 
 to these noblemen when he demanded the condemnation 
 of the perverse and impious doctrines professed by certain 
 men, especially with regard to the royal prerogative, and 
 
160 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 the rights of the crown in the legitimate and natural lineage 
 of the king. 
 
 The parliament answered this appeal of the heir-presump- 
 tive by declaring inviolable the right of succession to the 
 crown in the direct line, and any one guilty of high treason 
 who should propose to assail it on the pretext of the private 
 religion of the legitimate heir. During this deliberation, the 
 duke kept his eyes upon lords Argyle and Hamilton, who 
 studiously comported themselves in a manner calculated to 
 satisfy him as to their sentiments with respect to him; but 
 still he desired to put them and all his enemies to a further 
 proof. To the church of England test already existing, and 
 which every man in Scotland had been obliged to take under 
 Lauderdale, the duke proposed to add that every one who 
 sought to attain any office in church or state, must be an 
 elector, or qualified as such, or a member of parliament; must 
 engage upon oath thenceforward never to take part in any 
 resistance, of what nature soever; to defend all the preroga- 
 tives of the crown; never, without the permission of the king, 
 to take part in any deliberation upon ecclesiastical or civil 
 affairs; lastly, never to seek any reform in church or state. 
 Thus all resistance was fettered in anticipation; never had 
 tyranny been at such little pains to disguise its intentions. 
 Nor was this all: the duke ventured to propose as a special 
 clause in this new church-of-England test, that the members 
 of the royal family alone should be exempt from taking it. 
 
 Here the earl of Argyle broke out: he said plainly, that the 
 greatest danger from popery, in his opinion, was, that a prince 
 of the royal family should allow himself to be drawn into it, and 
 that it were better to have no test at all than one like this. 
 The bill passed, but when Argyle had to take the oath, he 
 added: " saving the right that every good protestant and 
 faithful subject has to propose, according to his conscience, 
 beneficial reform in church or state;" he was asked to add in 
 writing this reservation to the oath he had taken; he did so; 
 it was an odious trap: he had scarcely signed his name, when 
 he was arrested on a charge of high treason. Brought 
 before a special commission, he was condemned to death. 
 The dismal preparations for his execution were far advanced, 
 when his daughter effected his escape; he reached London; 
 a price was put upon his head; an order from the king com- 
 
1682.] THE DUKE OF YORK RECALLED. 161 
 
 manded him to be seized wherever he should be found; he 
 was fortunate enough to remain undiscovered. His fortune 
 was confiscated; a small portion was reserved for his family; 
 the rest was distributed, says the duke of York, as a trifling 
 compensation, among those whom the father of the earl had 
 ruined because of their fidelity to his majesty. Under this 
 pretence of restitution, the treasury did not fail to appropriate 
 to itself a considerable part of the forfeiture. 
 
 Despite the terrible example made of the earl of Argyle, 
 more than eighty ministers in the town of Edinburgh alone 
 refused to submit to the test; they were expelled from their 
 livings, and went into England, where things were not in 
 such an extreme state. All the leading inhabitants of the 
 provinces were called upon to take the new oath. They did 
 so, but slowly. The order issued directed each person should 
 be made sure of separately. This was an operation which 
 required time and incessant violence. The duke, impatient 
 to return to England, did not propose himself to follow it out 
 in detail. The completion of a task which he had so successfully 
 commenced, he intrusted to two men with whom he proposed 
 to leave the government of Scotland, the duke of Queensbury 
 and the earl of Aberdeen. For a long time past, he had been 
 intreating his brother to recal him. His letters, incessantly 
 cited Scotland, brought in a few months to an unexampled 
 state of tranquillity; they urged, with a dull and wearisome 
 complacency, the necessity of imitating, in England, the 
 system which was becoming established in Scotland, and this, 
 according to the duke, required his presence in the council. 
 It was now the close of the year 1681, the period for securing 
 sheriffs, magistrates, and jurors devoted to the court. Hyde, 
 become earl of Rochester, assured tjie king that the duke of 
 York would be very useful; the other ministers thought that 
 there was no longer any danger to be feared from presenting 
 him before his enemies. The king consented to his return; 
 but, as though fearing to give himself a master, he almost 
 simultaneously recalled to the ministry the earl of Sunderland 
 and the marquis of Halifax, who, in the question of the bill of 
 exclusion, had declared against the duke of York. 
 
 The frigate Gloucester, which brought the duke to England, 
 was wrecked upon a rock in the Yarmouth Roads. It had 
 on board more than an hundred and twenty sailors and pas- 
 
 M 
 
162 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 sengers, and among them some people of distinction; a boat 
 was let down capable of saving half the number; the duke 
 got into it alone, called colonel Churchill, his secret agent at 
 the court of Louis XIV., then a few priests, and his dogs, 
 two kinds of favourites, says an historian, from whom he 
 never separated; this choice made, he departed. Whether 
 from fear, or respect for etiquette, no one came forward to 
 follow him. At the moment that he reached the shore, the 
 ship disappeared with its whole crew, who sent forth loud 
 cries; this, according to the duke, was for joy at seeing his 
 person out of danger. His pride of birth saw nothing to 
 lament in this incident; and whatever devotion he gives the 
 victims credit for, he turns solely to his own glorification, as 
 proving to what a degree he was beloved, despite the endea- 
 vours of his enemies to set men against him. 
 
 When the duke returned to London, the loyal addresses 
 and complaints against the late parliaments recommenced; 
 the court progressed too slowly to suit the reactionists: the 
 clergy and the universities made themselves more peculiarly 
 conspicuous by the indecent eagerness of their adulation to 
 the court, their invectives against the defeated party. But 
 the latter still existed, entrenched behind the ignoramus 
 opposed by the whig grand juries to all indictments. It 
 was probable that the election of the new sheriffs, even if it 
 proceeded in the regular way, would be favourable to the 
 court, the citizens desiring to please it. But the court chilled 
 this disposition, by appearing to place little confidence in 
 them. In order to be certain of the matter, it interfered in 
 the election in virtue of a claim derived from the large domain 
 of ancient customs. The lord mayor of London elected in 
 the year 1681, under the influence of the new counter- 
 revolutionary movement, and entirely guided by secretary 
 Jenkins, who had played a part in the state since the affair of 
 Oxford, demanded, as a privilege formerly attached to his 
 office, the right of himself nominating one of the two sheriffs. 
 He chose North, a rich merchant, who accepted the office so 
 much the more eagerly, that he had but little chance of 
 success by election. The city asserted its violated privileges, 
 but with far less energy than it would have done in former 
 times. It fell back upon the election of the second sheriff. 
 The large majority desired to nominate a man whose influence 
 
1682.] PROSECUTION OF PILKINGTON AND WARD. 163 
 
 should counterbalance that of North, but among all the shades 
 of opinion of which the old opposition, now broken up, was 
 composed, circumstances rendered the choice difficult. The 
 suffrages were so divided that it was a man named Rich, of no 
 personal consideration, but patronized by the court, who 
 received the majority. North and Rich were proclaimed. 
 The people did not remain satisfied under their defeat; they 
 murmured, and in order to instal the two new sheriffs, it was 
 necessary to employ the armed force. 
 
 The counter-revolutionary party, become master of the 
 courts of justice through the sheriffs, hastened to make trial 
 of its new strength. At court, where principles of public 
 liberty were now only referred to with horror, as if those 
 principles were altogether new inventions, which no one 
 remembered to have professed when the popular party was 
 in power, men congratulated themselves that the scandal of 
 the ignoramus was about to cease. The duke of York first 
 had Pilkington, one of the late sheriffs, brought to trial: his 
 alleged crime was having said that the duke of York was 
 coming from Scotland to slaughter the patriots. Pilkington 
 was condemned to pay the duke 100,000/. damages, that is 
 to say, he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Sir 
 Patience Ward, the lord mayor of the preceding year, having 
 come forward as a witness in favour of Pilkington, was accused 
 of perjury, and, with blind passion, condemned to an infamous 
 punishment, which he would have undergone had he not 
 made a timely escape. 
 
 At London and in the provinces, a multitude of prosecu- 
 tions against obscure men, all stamped with the impress of 
 the present reaction, occupied the courts of justice; accusations 
 of nonconformity, or of language disrespectful to the king or 
 the duke. Now, for four years past, all England so generally 
 had spoken in that tone of the two princes, that it was diffi- 
 cult for the accused not to be denounced and judged by men 
 guilty or even more so than themselves. Accordingly, the 
 whole of these trials are the lasting shame of this epoch. 
 The court itself despised these base proceedings, which served 
 its purpose so well; it showed this clearly enough by the care 
 which it took to make sure of the future: this intoxication of 
 the public mind must have an end; before two years, the 
 nation would perhaps again demand a parliament according 
 
 m 2 
 
164 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1681- 
 
 to the promise of the declaration of Oxford; the king of 
 France, who, since April! 681, had been paying 1,500,000 
 livres a year, on condition that parliament should not be 
 assembled, and that England should not interfere in the 
 affairs of the continent, raised continual difficulties as to the 
 mode and time of the payments: it was necessary, therefore, 
 to provide- against the contingency of being compelled to 
 fulfil- the promise given for the observance of the triennial 
 Mfhn 
 
 Upon ■ tbes'e . cofisiddratferrs, - the duke of York boasts of 
 having counselled his brother to attack the validity of the 
 charters of the boroughs and corporations of the' kingdom. 
 By resuming these charters, the king would, according to 
 him, render it a legal impossibility for the nation to nominate 
 w r hig members, and deprive it even of the desire of again 
 seeing parliaments. Charles was not convinced that such 
 would be the result of seizing the charters, but if, in rendering 
 himself master of them, he could weaken them, and by 
 them, thus modified at his own discretion and returned 
 for a pecuniary consideration, influence future elections, this 
 would satisfy him. Any corrupting measure that moreover 
 brought hini. isioney 5 : i deligHted^ Mm';' 'iThrôWn 1 ,' despite him- 
 self, into the system of coups-d'état, hé did not reckon so 
 entirely upon succès fe as not, in any case, to contrive a retreat 
 for himself, i ife «might .consent to grow old in the contest 
 for constitutional royalty, bift to meet contingencies he made 
 a purse out of the public revenue, and out of his privy list, 
 and out of the money sent from France; and it was not with 
 the view of dyang.kin^ that he put by this hoard unknown to 
 anyone. ^tfLnoai JuodJiw TOUghJaf n 
 
 The seizure of thé charters was the most daring counter- 
 revolutionary step that had yet been attempted; the royal 
 concessions," in virtue of which the commons possessed these 
 charters, dated back three and four centuries in the history 
 of the progressive enfranchisement ; of the English nation 5 . 
 which had ever » regarded them with an 'almost, superstitious 
 veneratioh9Uv^il9.dtyribiind as::ït ; was, be blind to this new 
 attempt? The coulit,\ if rom the way in which it unmasked its 
 pretensions, seemed to think -so. , It invited the cities, 
 boroughs, and corporations, to give a new proof of their 
 fidelity by renouncing their ancient charters. There was an 
 
1682.] 
 
 PROSECUTION OP THE COMMON COUNCIL. 
 
 165 
 
 universal astonishment at this: men evinced neither indigna- 
 tion against the court, nor eagerness, to. comply with this ex- 
 traordinary proposition; in short, they gave no answer at alL 
 
 The corporations constituted by the charters were bodies 
 of citizens charged to watch over the interests of commerce, 
 to administer the property of orphans, to manage charities, 
 receive pious legacies, and direct works of embellishment and 
 utility. In London, and in the great towns, the general inte- 
 rests of the corporations were directed by a common council, 
 elected by all the citizens; this council had a great influence 
 in the election of members of parliament and. of the annual 
 magistrates, for here political interests were merely the ex- 
 pression of the private interests represented by- the various 
 corporations. The court wished at once to destroy these 
 directing councils, as being engines' of insurrection^ and to 
 abolish corporate privileges, as placing the magistrates at the 
 disposition of the people. To effect its object as quietly as 
 possible, it first invited the councils to surrender the charters, 
 and to come to an understanding with it respecting them; but 
 the councils declared that they could do nothing without the 
 authority of the corporations; that they had no more right to 
 give up the charters deposited in their hands, than to dispose 
 of the property confided to their administration. Their own 
 fortunes were at stake in the matter, and other considerable 
 pecuniary advantages, independent of that personal integrity 
 which men do not sacrifice so readily as they do religious and 
 political principles. ï oilduq edt '\o }.- 
 
 The court, unable to obtain these charters by persuasion, 
 resolved to gain possession of them by force. The attorney- 
 general, Sawyer, an intriguer without morality or talent, pro- 
 ceeded against the council of the city of London in the court 
 of king's bench, for having exceeded its privileges in erecting 
 itself into a political body and addressed to the king, upon 
 two occasions, petitions against the papists; these were 
 grievances anterior to the dissolution of the parliament of 
 Oxford. Sawyer maintained that corporations were dis- 
 solved by the abuse of privileges committed by their repre- 
 sentatives. Two celebrated barristers, Pollexfen and Treby, 
 pleaded for the city. They asserted that if the council was 
 really guilty of the transgressions imputed to it, the council 
 should be punished and not the corporation; that the governed 
 
166 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1682— 
 
 were never responsible for the faults of their magistrates; 
 that if the members of the council _were really chargeable 
 with seditious practices, they ought personally to be tried; 
 that the corporation would dismiss them if they were found 
 guilty. " But," added they, " is not this an absurd accusa- 
 tion? Can it be seriously meant to impute it as a crime to 
 our clients that they simply expressed their feelings against 
 popery, at a time when the king, the court, the houses of 
 parliament, the courts of justice, all proclaimed the existence 
 of a popish plot, and proceeded with rigour against the con- 
 spirators ?" 
 
 The court of king's bench, however, decided that corpora- 
 tions were responsible for the conduct of the officers nominated 
 by it and for it; that these officers had exceeded the privileges 
 of corporations; that these privileges having emanated from 
 the crown, the crown had a right to withdraw them. This 
 judgment produced deep discontent throughout London. 
 There was no appeal against it. Still, in order to execute 
 it, there was every probability that the employment of force 
 would be necessary, and here the court hesitated. Enjoying, 
 since the affair of Oxford, a series of favourable chances, 
 it had as yet no soldiers, and its present ascendency rested 
 solely on the fears created in the minds of the rich by the 
 spirit of the last three parliaments. 
 
 The forcible withdrawal of the charters was therefore post- 
 poned. It was thought sufficient for the time, to have obtained 
 the decree of the judges of the king's bench. Meanwhile the 
 inferior courts continued to prosecute the protestant noncon- 
 formists, now subjected to rigours which they seemed but too 
 well to have provoked. Reduced to submission, they evinced 
 a sort of menacing resignation; they remained silent. This 
 gave reason to suppose that they meditated some secret ven- 
 geance, and according to the imprudent expression of the 
 duke of York, they were kept in play in order that they might 
 have no time for carrying on their projects. 
 
 The same system abandoned Scotland, and this again more 
 peculiarly through the influence of the duke of York, to the 
 barbarous inquisition of the church of England converters. 
 No inhabitant of the country, young or old, rich or poor, 
 noble, citizen, or peasant, was exempt from attendance in the 
 churches to hear the sermons of the king's ministers. And 
 
1683.] PERSECUTION OF THE SCOTTISH PRESBYTERIANS. 167 
 
 here began the decline of that presbyterian faith, before so 
 earnest, so confident in help from the Most High, so revolu- 
 tionary in its relations with the political order. Great numbers 
 of those who allowed themselves to be driven to the churches, 
 passed at once from those doctrines, abandoned, according to 
 them, by Heaven, to an indifference towards all religious forms; 
 some even became atheists; still the resistance, punished by 
 imprisonment, by fines, by loss of the franchise, was very 
 extensive. There was nothing to be done but to submit, to 
 rebel, or to quit Scotland. Many decided upon the latter 
 course, but their resolution was tumultuous; they sent con- 
 fidential agents to London to treat with the company which, 
 by letters-patent, had obtained the cession of Carolina. They 
 desired to establish themselves in that country; there, said 
 they, we shall live free and tranquil, as men, as Christians. 
 
 The agents concluded nothing that year, but meantime 
 inspired the court with serious uneasiness by their language. 
 Those in power, informed of what was passing between them 
 and the company, took measures against the mass of the pres- 
 byterians, calculated to hasten and to extend the emigration. 
 In the beginning of the year 1683, there appeared a royal 
 proclamation, ordering the judges of the western and southern 
 counties of Scotland to go a circuit, and institute proceedings 
 against all who should have concealed rebels, or who should 
 have been at all connected with them, even though the said 
 rebels had not been denounced in any edict or prosecution. 
 Those who had had relations of friendship or hospitality with 
 the enemies of the state, were to be prosecuted as traitors 
 themselves. The inquiry was to be continued for three years ; 
 the derisive promise of a general pardon at the end of that 
 time, put the finishing stroke to the despair of those whom 
 love of country still attached to the land, and whom religion 
 forbad to remain there at the price of the sacrifices required 
 by the test. Immediately on the commencement of the cir- 
 cuits of the judges, the same presbyterian envoys returned to 
 London, and this time had conferences with the old chiefs of 
 the national party defeated at Oxford; what they learned 
 from these gave them new hopes. 
 
 The whigs had long been forming a conspiracy. This 
 name, which then was used only to signify rebels, few men, 
 since the affair of Oxford, had consented to bear, but these, 
 
168 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1682- 
 
 by their influence, their talents, their energy, were the elite 
 of the defenders of that cause which the citizen class had 
 abandoned in a body. Discouraged at first by this desertion, 
 they had retired into their families.- There, keeping apart 
 from, politics, they watched the progress of affairs with deep 
 sorrow. Not seeing that what was then passing was done by 
 the nation, and not by the court; that they themselves had 
 committed errors, and had given rise to alarms to which the 
 cause of liberty had been sacrificed, they said amongst them- 
 selves, that the contract between the people and the king had 
 been violently broken; that it was a duty of conscience for 
 them to attempt the employment of force against force ; 
 that it was disgraceful for the nation which had overthrown 
 Charles I., to put up with his two sons* But this all virtuous 
 indignation was not enterprising : the ambition of the duke 
 of Monmouth, and the passions of Shaftesbury, set it in 
 motion. -ijoirlt <odw {reatbi abiti no 
 
 Shaftesbury, quitting the Tower at the end of the year 1681, 
 and exasperated to the : highest degree by the; dagger he had 
 incurred, long declaimed against the inaction of Essex, of 
 Russell, and of all those* who had supported with him the bill 
 of exclusion in the three last parliaments. His reproaches, 
 w r hich became more violent during the fermentation created 
 by the .affair of the sheriffs of London, in the commencement of 
 1682, decided several of those whom his complaints were 
 directed against, upon having a conference with him on 
 public affairs. A meeting was zf^imketkaWthe hyiim of a 
 wholesale wine-merchant, n.amed Shepherd. Shaftesbury did 
 not attend; he sent in his place Rumséy and- Fergusson, two of 
 those restless men who had served him as emissaries in the 
 affair of the petitions and in all the tumults of the popish 
 plot and the bill of exclusion. Rumsey and Fergusson, on 
 the appearance of lords Essex, Grey, and Russell, somewhat 
 disconcerted by the presence of three such ex altedopër sonages, 
 began the conference with Armstrong, an ex-captain of the 
 guards, brought by lord Grey. Rumsey said that it would 
 be easy to raise the guards. Armstrong, who had commanded 
 them, treated any attempt of that kind as mere madness, 
 and nothing further was said on either side. Shortly after- 
 wards Shaftesbury and lords Essex and Salisbury, met for a 
 fresh conference. Shaftesbury quitted it in a perfect fury at 
 
1683.] FORMATION OF A FRESH CONSPIRACY. 169 
 
 being unable to bring the others over to his plan of insurrec- 
 tion, and almost immediately left England. 
 
 Shaftesbury's object then, as it had been ever since his 
 rupture with the court, was to overthrow the duke of York 
 and the king, and to crown the duke of Monmouth. Now, 
 upon this point, the patriot chiefs no more agreed with him 
 than they did as to the time and the mode of insurrection. 
 It was, therefore, not until after the departure of Shaftesbury 
 that the conspiracy assumed a determinate character. The 
 duke of Monmouth, having lost his dangerous counsellor, 
 connected himself more particularly with lord Essex. This 
 nobleman, in the end, became convinced that the friends of 
 liberty could not do better than, availing themselves of the 
 name of the duke and his popularity in Scotland and in 
 England, to assert his claim to the crown. He brought lord 
 Russell over to this opinion, who, in his turn, undertook to 
 secure Algernon Sidney. Sidney, who, throughout a long 
 and virtuous career, had had the rare advantage of supporting 
 the revolution to the last, and of keeping wholly apart from 
 the condemnation of Charles I.; of resisting Cromwell, and of 
 comprehending that the revolution still lived, even under his 
 dictatorship; of holding office under the restoration, and of 
 preserving his republican opinions, not secret, but declared 
 and known to all the world,— long resisted Russell's intreaties; 
 he thought little of the duke of Monmouth, and was far more 
 hostile to royalty than to Charles II,, or to the duke of York 
 personally. " What matters it to me," saiâ he, ^whether 
 a king of England call himself James of York or James 
 of Monmouth." But Russell representing to him that his 
 republican conception was that of a very weak minority, that 
 there was an invincible prejudice in England against a 
 republic: — H "Well, be it so," said he, "■ since we must submit 
 to royalty, 'tis better to have a king whose' rights are equivo- 
 cal; he will be more con si derate ^toward s liberty." From that 
 moment Sidney ranked among the friends of Monmouth. 
 He, in his turn, enlisted lord Howard, a man unworthy of 
 his friendship, but who. had gained it by assuming opinions 
 similar to his own. Lord Grey, and Hampden, grandson of 
 the celebrated patriot, entered last into the association. 
 
 It was while it was forming, that in England the attack 
 upon the charters took place, and in Scotland those acts of 
 
170 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1682- 
 
 tyranny which brought the agents of the presbyterian 
 emigrants to London. On the first visit of the latter, their 
 reports as to the position of Scotland directed the hopes of the 
 conspirators to that quarter. They met more frequently; but, 
 fearful of taking too decided measures, they came to no deter- 
 mination. When the royal proclamation of 1683 compelled 
 the presbyterians to a prompt decision, their agents, as has 
 been mentioned, returned to London. It was then that, 
 informed of what was going on, they abandoned their project 
 of expatriation to enter into the plot. Their co-operation 
 influenced the resolution that the operations should be con- 
 ducted in Scotland for the present, and that the earl of Argyle 
 should be furnished with arms and vessels to make a descent 
 upon the west of that kingdom. Argyle was then a refugee 
 in Holland: the money which was to defray the expenses of 
 his expedition was not forthcoming, and things languished. 
 
 Meanwhile, by the side of this conspiracy of the lords, all 
 of them, with one exception, animated by patriotic views, but 
 irresolute and more confident in their cause than in their 
 means, another conspiracy was formed, which sought to strike 
 a more decisive blow by the hand of lower agents. It was 
 the work of the subordinate friends of Shaftesbury. They 
 assembled in London, at the house of one West, who had a 
 private press incessantly engaged in the production of 
 pamphlets against the court. Here met Rumsey and Fer- 
 gusson, the same who had conferred with lord Russell at 
 Shepherd's ; Goodenough, who had been under-sheriff of 
 London, under Cornish andBethell; one Halloway, of Bristol, 
 which city he boasted he could raise; an Irish gentleman, 
 named Walcot, and some old officers of Cromwell's army. 
 The duke of Monmouth was not ignorant of the existence of 
 this society, which also discussed the means of making him 
 king; but Howard was the only one of his friends whose 
 habits permitted his frequenting West's house. The con- 
 spirators ridiculed the tardiness of their superior plotters, and 
 the poverty of their proposed means. It was plainly said, 
 that nothing could be more simple than to make way for the 
 duke of Monmouth; that all that was necessary was to shoot 
 the king and the duke of York, a design which could readily 
 be effected by a dozen determined and well-mounted men. 
 The ex-officers mentioned a farm, called the Rye House, on 
 
1683.] THE RYE HOUSE PLOT. 171 
 
 the road to Newmarket, which the princes would pass, as 
 well adapted for a nocturnal ambuscade. The conspirators 
 grew excited as the officers explained how they would distri- 
 bute their people so as to terrify the escort, cut off all retreat, 
 approach the carriage, and disappear, after having killed the 
 duke and the king. 
 
 There was, however, a long distance between this plan 
 and its execution; and even supposing that it had not ex- 
 ceeded the courage of the men, chance, and more than chance, 
 extreme caution, were required for its success. The contrary 
 occurred. That year, a fire which took place at Newmarket 
 obliged the princes to return to London much sooner than 
 usual; and Keeling, one of the emissaries who, from West's 
 house, had spread themselves through the taverns and streets 
 of London, discovered all. Hearing that they were betrayed, 
 West's friends dispersed. West and Rumsey took a more 
 prudent course; instead of flying, they concerted between 
 them a version of the plot, which their perfect agreement was 
 to pass off as the only true one if they should be arrested. 
 Meanwhile, Keeling's statement had gone abroad. It was 
 the outline of the plot, filled up with all that a man, intent 
 upon making his fortune by his treachery, could invent. 
 Rumsey and West, having surrendered themselves, confirmed 
 it, with certain restrictions as to points which it was im- 
 portant for them to conceal, and, in their turn, ran riot as to 
 that part of the plot, of which they said they had disapproved 
 — the assassination of the king at the Rye House. In their 
 desire to demonstrate the infallibility of the military arrange- 
 ments constituting the plan of attack, formed, according to 
 them, by Cromwell's ex-officers, they rendered incredible in 
 the judgment of all honest men, that which had otherwise 
 caused universal horror; yet men designated as a miracle 
 from Heaven that fire at Newmarket, which, by bringing the 
 king unexpectedly back to London, had disconcerted the plans 
 of the conspirators. 
 
 When he had told all that he and West had agreed upon, 
 with reference to the Rye House plot, Rumsey related what 
 Shaftesbury or lord Howard had told him about Russell, 
 Essex, Sidney, and their friends. He denounced the inter- 
 view which the Scottish presbyterians had had in London with 
 these lords, and his meeting with Russell at Shepherd's house. 
 

 172 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1682- 
 
 Russell was at once warned of his danger: he was implored to 
 fly, and he could have done so; but he would not run the risk 
 of compromising his friends by availing himself of the oppor- 
 tunity. The king himself interrogated him. He showed 
 neither fear nor haughtiness; he acknowledged having been 
 at Shepherd's house on the day named, and having met there 
 an individual who might have been Rumsey, but distinctly 
 denied that a single word about public affairs was said in Msr 
 presence, Sidney was arrested next, and also appeared be- 
 fore the council. He infused into his answers somewhat 
 more of that acerbity which was natural to him. As nothing 
 was known with regard to him, they sought, by threatening 
 or vexatious questions, to get a confession from him. Pie 
 told them plainly that he saw what they were aiming at; that 
 if they could set up any charge, against him, he would answer : 
 it as best he might, but that, meantime, he would not fumishî 
 them with- weapons against himself. After Sidney, Bailie, 
 one of the Scottish agents, was interrogated by the king and 
 by the duke of York. He was a man of rare vigouf^frmnd, 
 and a readiness of repartee which neither place nor circum- 
 stance could suppress. He answered the harsh interrogations 
 of the king and his brother with a bitter disdain and a happy 
 appositeness, which put them both into a fury. Herwâs loaded 
 with chains, iron boots were put upon his legs, and he was 
 thus sent to Scotland. The duke of Monmouth concealed 
 himself, despite the assurances sent to him by the king through 
 the duchess. Lord Grey, also denounced by Rumsey,! was 
 arrested and taken to the Tower, but contrived to escape. 
 
 With the exception of the meeting at Shepherd's, and some 
 vague information which had not failed to reach even the 
 subordinate conspirators, there was nothing, so far, which 
 directly inculpated the noblemen confined in the Tower: but 
 Howard was arrested. lie was the only noble conspirator 
 who had participated in the sentiments and intentions of thenl 
 Rye House plotters. He was base enough to tell all he knew; 
 and, moreover, displeased that, for some time past, those who 
 might be called his accomplices had manifested distrust of him, 
 he declared that there existed a council of six persons, who 
 for a year past had been preparing an insurrection in Scot- 
 land; that agents had come from that country, whose state- 
 ments the council had sent men to verify on the spot; that he 
 
1633.] CONDEMNATION OF LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL. 173 
 
 himself liad for some time been a member of this council, the 
 other members being Sidney, Essex, Russell, Grey, and 
 Hampden. The disclosures of Howard, notwithstanding his 
 notorious immorality, left little doubt as to the reality of the 
 plot; and the two affairs, to the great advantage of the court, 
 were mixed up together in public opinion. Hampden was 
 arrested, and refused to give any answer. Lord Essex, who 
 might have fled, chose, like Russell, to incur the consequences 
 rather than to manifest fear of them; but he was scarce in 
 the Tower, than he was overwhelmed with an access of pro- 
 found melancholy, and, finding life insupportable, he desired 
 to hasten its termination by confessing all that concerned 
 himself personally. His wife induced him to remain silent, 
 but she could not save him from a weakness almost as great: 
 he committed suicide on the morning of the day when Russell's 
 trial commenced. **n .jbxIj tud ^iî§iia ail tead bb t 
 
 This was an argument of which the prosecutors availed 
 themselves. The jury was composed of citizens of London, 
 not landed proprietors, which was contrary to the distinct 
 provisions of the law. Russell challenged it, but in vain. 
 The witnesses brought against him were the wine merchant 
 Shepherd, Rumsey, and lord Howard. Shepherd falsely 
 deposed that Russell had been twice at his house; but it was 
 clear he had been there once. Rumsey falsely deposed that 
 he had proposed to Russell to gain over the guards; he 
 h ad made this propositi on to -Arm strong; but, so far, it did not 
 seem probable that Russell, present at the discussion, should 
 have heard nothing of the matter. Lastly, Howard declared 
 that'Rufssell had several times attended with him the council 
 of six. The witnesses for the defence knew nothing of the 
 affair, but declared that they did not believe Russell capable 
 of entering into so dark a conspiracy. The court rejected 
 these futile depositions. Russell was to make the sacrifice of 
 his; life. Had he not had for fellow -prisoners men who were 
 dear to him, lie could at once have confounded his accusers 
 by telling the exact truth, and this would have sufficed to 
 destroy him; but for the sake of his friends, less compromised 
 than himself, he consented to defend himself by the subtleties 
 of the law. Death was pronounced against him. 
 
 -A few days were given him to prepare to die. He employed 
 them in devotion and in pious meditations. His mind was 
 
174 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1683- 
 
 perfectly serene; lie manifested this by many felicitous ex- 
 pressions. He regulated all his affairs with the world; the 
 most important being his reputation, he wrote an account of 
 his conduct and principles; he avowed no participation in the 
 plot, but declared himself a partisan of the right of insur- 
 rection, and explained his views in language not offensive to 
 the court. On his way to the scaffold, he was received 
 variously with imprecations and with expressions of kindness. 
 His head had no sooner fallen, than his last writing rapidly 
 spread through London, sought for, however, rather from a 
 vivid curiosity than from sympathy. Russell might have 
 known that they who, from love of repose, had rallied round 
 the court after the event of Oxford, would not pardon him 
 for endangering that repose by conspiring against the power 
 which their weakness had restored. The apology of Russell 
 was responded to as the declaration of Oxford had been. 
 Infinite addresses arrived, denouncing the doctrine of the 
 right of insurrection, congratulating the king on having 
 escaped the snares of the wicked, and demanding the prompt 
 chastisement of the other conspirators. 
 
 Nothing more fortunate than this plot could have occurred 
 for the court; by its acts of violence it had been on the point 
 of driving the nation back into the still sure paths of 
 Anglican opposition; but now it preserved its ascendancy; 
 its arbitrary acts, in the eyes of the mass, were authorized by 
 the danger which it had incurred; a danger which it ex- 
 aggerated, as maintaining in its hands a dictatorship which 
 was regarded as salutary. Allowing itself to be carried away, 
 says an historian, by the reflux of the passions which had 
 created the popish plot, it largely enjoyed the satisfaction of 
 revenging itself upon enemies whom in reality it did not con- 
 sider at all formidable: three of the accomplices of West were 
 condemned and executed; the trials of those not in custody 
 were proceeded with, as well as of those actually in prison, 
 and false witnesses were sought out, so that none might 
 escape. One of the judges who laboured for the court was 
 that Jeffreys who, at the time of the persecution of the 
 abhorrers by the exclusion parliament, had been obliged to 
 conceal himself in London. He made himself conspicuous 
 by the shameless perversion with which he interpreted the 
 laws and the evidence against the accused, and by a sort of 
 
1684.] TRIAL OF ALGERNON SIDNEY. 175 
 
 presence of mind which ever met the soundest arguments 
 of reason with one of the sophisms of power. It rarely 
 happened that he was not half intoxicated when he took his 
 seat on the bench, and then his zeal exhaled in coarse 
 sarcasms, which told excellently well at court. He was 
 nominated chief justice for the trial of Sidney, and there 
 were associated with him three men and a jury, all exactly 
 fitted to act under him. 
 
 Russell had been tried by honourable men; against him 
 there were sufficiently strong proofs; but Howard alone 
 accused Sidney; it was necessary to invent and give effect to 
 some other evidence. They at first relied upon the facility 
 with which Sidney lost his temper, and hoped that, in the 
 presence of such judges, he would give way to his indigna- 
 tion and inculpate himself; but this did not happen. Sidney 
 appeared; his countenance was firm and reserved; he com- 
 menced by challenging the jury; Jeffreys violently inter- 
 rupted him, saying, that this had been decided in the case of 
 Russell. There was something so monstrous in the brutality of 
 this man, that Sidney was astounded, and made no reply. 
 Howard presented himself, and with incredible audacity in- 
 troduced pleasantries into his depositions against the man 
 whom he had so foully deceived. After he had spoken, 
 Jeffreys presented to the court, as the other evidence, a 
 manuscript found among Sidney's papers; it was a severe 
 criticism upon a contemptible book lately sent forth, which 
 carried back to the first man, in order of primogeniture, the 
 absolute right of kings over their subjects. There was well 
 reason to be astonished that a superior mind should have 
 seriously occupied itself with the refutation of such a doctrine; 
 but Jeffreys viewed the manuscript as a condemnatory expo- 
 sition of Sidney's principles with regard to the legitimacy of 
 kings, and said that it was unnecessary to seek further for the 
 second proof required by the law. In support of this view, 
 he, with his customary volubility and assurance, sent forth 
 such numberless absurdities, that Sidney, to avoid the inflic- 
 tion of having to instruct the court upon the most elementary 
 principles of the law, did not attempt to combat Jeffreys' 
 unprecedented dicta. It was evident that they were deter- 
 mined to have his head: he did not desire, so near a glo- 
 rious death, to put his patience to so trying a test as that of 
 
176 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1683- 
 
 expkining the law to those who could not. or would not, 
 understand it. 
 
 When the sheriffs came to inform him of his condemnation, 
 he resumed the exercise of his lofty reason, and of his impres- 
 sive eloquence. He now spoke to men who could hear him: 
 "T lament not," said he, " the life I am about to lose, nor 
 blame you for its loss; I regret it not; but why did they not 
 kill me without a" trial, since they were resolved to violate in 
 my case all the forms which the law gives to the prisoner 
 for his protection? I am sorry for yourselves," he added, 
 after a brief silence; "for be assured that this death, to me 
 so indifferent, will cry aloud to Heaven against you. I appeal 
 to your own conscience: think you that you did your duty 
 when you selected as the jury to hear me, men so 'utterly 
 ignorant, so blindly devoted to the court?" One of the 
 ^lelMwept.. J 0fl ^ V ', 
 
 Sidney prepared for death 5 . His religious belief had 
 always passed as coming no nearer than deism. He, however, 
 sent for presbyterian ministers, and had several conversations 
 with them. He also wrote an apology, much the same with 
 the defence which he had not thought fit to pronounce before 
 his judges. Not in a position to avow the existence of the 
 council of six, for Hampden, the duke of Monmouth, and 
 lord Grey, would have suffered from this declaration, he con- 
 fined himself to invalidating the testimony of Howard; he 
 asked how any one' could believe that such a man as Howard 
 would be admitted into a secret like that ; a man who could 
 not raise four foot soldiers, not having four shillings wliere- 
 ■with ito.^ay them for a clay? With regard to the manuscript 
 found among his papers, he supported its principles, speak- 
 ing of the Mvine. right of kings with a refined mockery, and 
 of the principles of public liberty with an all-convincing 
 reason. The document concluded with the following prayer: 
 "Though I fair à sacrifice to idols, suffer not idolatry to be 
 established in this land. Bless thy people, and save them. 
 Defend thy own cause. Defend those that defend it. Stir 
 up such as are faint. Direct those that are willing. Confirm 
 those that waver. Give wisdom and integrity unto all. 
 Grant that I may die glorifying thee for all thy mercies, and 
 that at the last thou hast permitted me to be singled out as a 
 witness of thy truth, and even by the confession of my 
 
1684.] EXECUTION OF ARMSTRONG AND HALLO WAY. 177 
 
 opposers, for that old cause in which Î was from my youth 
 ens-aired, and for which thou hast often wonderfully declared 
 thyself." 
 
 He did not speak on the scaffold, and his death produced 
 no great sensation. His virtues were not of that class which 
 interest the mass of the people; and as to the citizens, they 
 blamed while they pitied him, Hampden had nothing against 
 him but the deposition of Howard. The imagination of Jeffreys 
 did not supply what was w r anting to effect his condemnation 
 to death; his punishment was an enormous fine; his fortune 
 was not sufficient to pay it, and he remained in prison. 
 Halloway, one of the conspirators at West's house, taken in 
 the East Indies, and Armstrong, arrested in Holland, were 
 tried in the beginning of the year 1684. They confessed all, 
 with the exception of the project for killing the king. Hallo- 
 way, in fact, was not one of those who had entertained this 
 extravagant project, and Armstrong had never had anything 
 in common with those who had imagined it. Halloway, less 
 noted in connexion with these trials than Russell and Sidney, 
 manifested the kind of energy which those two great patriots 
 had denied themselves from considerations of friendship. He 
 said that it was true he had conspired; that in doing so he 
 believed he was fulfilling a sacred duty, and that he should 
 die with the same conviction. Even on the scaffold, he de- 
 fended what he had done. Armstrong, who had passed part of 
 his life in dissipation, piously resigned "himself to his fate; only 
 -one thought disturbed his last moments, that he died without 
 being able to confute an abominable calumny — a calumny 
 emanating from the king himself. Charles seeing, in fact, 
 that the courageous declarations of Halloway and Armstrong 
 fixed in a precise manner the character and degree of maturity 
 of the double conspiracy, and fearing that Armstrong, far less 
 compromised than Halloway, would inspire the interest which 
 resulted from these tardy elucidations, had the miserable 
 baseness to say that this was not the first time that Armstrong 
 had attempted his life, for that before the restoration he had 
 come to Holland to assassinate him. Now many people knew, 
 on the contrary, that Armstrong had gone to Holland for the 
 purpose of conveying to the king money and intelligence of 
 those of his party who desired his return. 
 
 Despite the precision of the declarations of Armstrong and 
 
 N 
 
178 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1684- 
 
 Halloway, the counter-revolutionary party continued to re- 
 present the Rye House plot as formidable, and exerted itself 
 with great activity to establish, which it was important for 
 it to have believed, that the insurrection was organized in 
 Bristol and Scotland. Charles committed the error of seek- 
 ing to support his government as long as possible upon this 
 idea. He received Jeffreys, the hero of this whole affair, at 
 Windsor, and directed him to make a circuit in the provinces, 
 On dismissing him he gave him a ring, which obtained the 
 designation of the ring of blood; but even in granting this 
 despicable person so great a mark of favour, he could not 
 refrain from these strange words, so expressive of the per- 
 petual contradiction between his sagacity and his position: 
 " You are going to travel," he said, "the summer is hot; 
 take care you do not drink too much." Jeffreys proceeded 
 on his mission to prosecute the whigs in the provinces. 
 
 In Scotland, the earl of Aberdeen and the duke of Queens- 
 bury connected the inquiry relative to the Rye House plot 
 with the comprehensive system of prosecutions already or- 
 ganized in virtue of the royal ordinance of the preceding 
 year. A troop of justiciaries departed from Edinburgh, 
 attended by soldiers, and spread themselves over Scotland. 
 Left entirely to their own discretion, they went from house 
 to house, and proceeded in this manner. They said to one; 
 " You took part in the Bothwell insurrection;" to another — 
 "You gave refuge to one of the insurgents;" or, "You knew 
 of his retreat, and did not communicate the information to 
 government." Of the greater number they asked: "What is 
 your opinion of the Bothwell insurrection, or of the Rye 
 House plot?" Some were merely called upon to take the test 
 devised by the duke of York and to declare that they had 
 never had any connexion either with Argyle, or with the 
 insurgents of Bothwell, or with the agents of the English plot. 
 As, in Scotland, the number of those who considered themselves 
 authorised to secure repose by perjuring themselves was very 
 limited, that of those found guilty, by their own admission, of 
 disaffection to the government, was immense. The prisons, 
 in fact, could not hold them; fines were imposed upon them, 
 or they were made sure of by quartering the troops upon 
 them, and obliging them to appear several times a-day before . 
 the officers of the detachments. 
 
1685.] 
 
 EXECUTION OF BAILLIE. 
 
 179 
 
 For some time this tyranny had fallen only upon men ; but 
 by means of the test, of which the women openly expressed 
 their horror, they themselves at length were involved in the 
 general oppression. Fathers and husbands were made respon- 
 sible for their submission to the test, and called upon them- 
 selves, under pain of fine or imprisonment, to compel their 
 attendance at the Anglican churches. This last measure, 
 proposed by Queensbury, was opposed by the earl of Aber- 
 deen, as impracticable. A dispute ensued between them. 
 The duke of York, siding with Queensbury, obtained from 
 the king the recal of the earl of Aberdeen, and had lord Perth 
 nominated in his place, secretly a catholic, yet who appeared, 
 says an historian, to have undertaken the task of showing 
 England what she had to fear from a popish king. Under 
 him the executions became more numerous: five gentlemen, 
 a domestic of the earl of Argyle, a cousin of the duchess of 
 Monmouth, and Baillie, some months before transferred to 
 Scotland, perished as accomplices of the English plot. 
 
 We shall only speak of the trial of Baillie. This courageous 
 friend of Russell and Sidney was almost on the threshold of 
 death, from the excess of privations and ill treatment he had 
 undergone in his captivity, when they intimated to him a 
 letter from the king accusing him of being one of the Rye 
 House conspirators, and of having endeavoured to raise an 
 insurrection in Scotland; he was allowed two days to clear 
 himself, by oath, from this accusation, in default of which he 
 was to be held guilty. During these two days, the strength 
 of Baillie continued to decline; but when, at the expiration of 
 the time, the commissioners came to receive his answer, he 
 energetically refused any explanation whatever. He lived 
 long enough to afford a spectacle to the population of Edin- 
 burgh, and, to the last breath, bore with a firmness equal to 
 that of the presbyterian martyrs, tortures in which he had 
 not religious enthusiasm to support him. 
 
 Baillie was the last of those who perished for the Rye 
 House plot. The government, while seeking to convince the 
 nation that the conspirators had put it in great danger, had 
 acquired full proof of their utter weakness. No one had 
 arisen in their favour; many honest men even condemned 
 them. The reason is, that if certain principles can make in- 
 surrection a high-souled duty whenever there is violation of 
 
 n2 
 
180 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1684- 
 
 liberty, they wlio devote themselves to this duty too often 
 incur the risk of compromising those whom they wish to serve; 
 and to the latter it is ever a crime to fail, in that which they 
 deem it no crime to undertake. The Rye House plot had 
 this effect with reference to those whom the Oxford affair had 
 reduced to dark expedients. The court, now more powerful 
 than ever, drew around the scaffold of Russell and of Sidney a 
 vast circle of inculpation, involving all whom it regarded 
 with apprehension. No one murmured at its revenge; no 
 one opposed the illegaîMes^EIc%4ri committed under the pre- 
 text of the plot. Nor did any one resist when it required the 
 towns and corporations to surrender their charters; obedience 
 was commanded as a sort of answer to the doctrines on the 
 right of resistance inculcated by Russell and Sidney in their 
 last writings. This victory might have been turned to the 
 advancement ©fr.-order, if power had not desired to retain the 
 extraordinary'' .force which circumstances gave it; but in 
 reality, it turned to the benefit of the counter-revolution : it 
 placed at the head of «[ffàira tàe dukeiof York, and those, who, 
 pressing around him, seemed justified in placing their system 
 of government by the side of their already fulfilled anticipa- 
 tions. They had always said nb!®t men wouki ^taeklroyalty 
 after they had overthrown popery; successful defenders of 
 royalty, their irresistible ascendancy was now to be employed 
 
 in consecratirior arbitrary rule by the' traditions %f pessary, 
 
 i— eam-gabl 99'ifff sdi issod-grsoiili ssoffio oj bsterste etâ(&q 
 
 t3 îo ifo-milo sdi \o e-i'jJmsai sdi tenis^ baiuïti nnnoo 
 
 [sxrsO— floeaifol husmS îo ban nobaoJîo (jorfeid sdi io elshT 
 
 uïdbiiti soïlodi&o Qtoisbom otai^jraq S nilin sdi ïo noitewqsS— noierai 
 
 .soiloifijBO 
 
 bs'f&lqaib bnd iioT 'ïo eAub edi doidw iiso-gh hhT 
 
 (OBiiqeaoo dgittoog-oIgnA edi bswolldï Udi se mil lu old u oit 
 
 : v ria§m ed1 ïo toallotni ïo £wm edi ad ot mid gni/o'iq ni 
 
 lai Jûifr mid avig ot bajfjdhjfioo ^lid-g'ds ion bad ^litnA 
 
 I .^q aid balisa s^nidj lo aainoa Unutea adj doidw oj 
 
 toteadigs ^Idsnaad ton bml -garÀ edi roisgnaJb 
 
 ban ;Ii/ïagu Ifegmîif gahtem moil ledtoid sid hieveiq 
 
 ïo muh <wid sbiiswoj veuoljjajr sid lo 'xadtjn letted adj frog 
 
 9xIj ot ûol won aH .seaniand -iol owiavs aWioni 
 
1685.] 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE DUKE OF YORK. 
 
 181 
 
 n \sih moffw saoift goiaimoiqmoo 'lo Ah sift ■ 
 jodi doidtr t&dï ai t iidi ot dmho r> -1379 ai îi i^tef srfj lV 
 bad jolq aauoH 9v;H enlT .sifitaôbnjj oi smho on ti 
 hBdimh£bidïxO acft moriw saoifo ot soud%el<yi diivr uosftz 
 Miawoq 9'iom won <twoo edT .pJnsibeqzs Ivzb oi boo 
 b xdabfc îo bas II98811H îo blcftuoa orb bnuoin wst6 /, 
 Labir^-i li moxlw IIx$ gaMovni c aoiteqIjjoai Jo si 
 on ;9gfi9V9i sli to bsiuflmrm / .noian 
 
 -9'iq edi isbau Lstifnm^ftaPTER Bfegsffi silt bssoq* 
 odi f)9ir upsi ti nsdw taiasi ano yn/] bib 10VL .tolq 9dî fe 
 
 jhj no «ssmmoir efcirm^yT^Tta io lioa e as UdDasmmoo 
 ii9ff J ni Y^nfjia bna IfeaanH yd feteôliroiri ôomïtaîasi lo 
 
 ^Tie°^t6â fI 3P"%'cfifk' î '' tlie catholics, and fhe absohuisls, atSgftiJlH^t of the 
 °. SJffl^-^-dûtMii-^-ÉiirJtuïe between [tie king" and the pre dominant 
 party— Death of the Idng— Triumph ..'of' the catholics;; accession of 
 James IF. — Promises-of James IL ; oath of the coronation— Resignation 
 çOrfvàf^ltèii^pyk^'é the 
 
 m9 *§) T 0$is& r #ik gaiessi^ iskebgstà&é^fk tiifi 9Moptir|?4T i 4^c)j) t l^f ft e eaf l 
 -XJqiôfrihfgjllèiiûkirihe duke; .of Monraouth^The. catholic party strengthened 
 \dii^p'îh^mi^^éhémxQr^ to absolute power, to the right of dispensing with 
 Jo fetBài^9loxEjegtie'd by jparliameni-^Prorogat^^.jO/^^ariiarnent— -Establish- 
 ba^oéqefcaoêcfc #tanài#g.ann y— Conversions to popery— Decision of the 
 j^^rpf}^e n &#g's : . bench in %ffl»f ^$fti$Çg e; BHP£ power — The 
 papists elevated to offices throughout the three kingdoms— Ecclesiastical 
 commission instituted against the members of the church of England — 
 Trials of the bishop of London and of Samuel Johnson — General sub- 
 mission — Separation of the ruling party into moderate catholics and high 
 catholics. 
 
 The vigour which the duke of York had displayed in the 
 troublous times that followed the Anglo- Scottish conspiracy, 
 in proving him to be the man of intellect of the reigning 
 family, had not slightly contributed to give him that influence 
 to which the natural course of things called his party. In that 
 dangerous crisis, the king had not been able, as theretofore, to 
 prevent his brother from making himself useful; and he had 
 got the better rather of his jealousy towards him, than of his 
 invincible aversion for business. He now left to the duke, 
 more laborious, more firm, more active than himself, the care 
 
182 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1684- 
 
 of governing by means, the odium of which he was perhaps 
 not sorry also to transfer to him. All England remarked this 
 change in the relative position of the two brothers; men re- 
 peated the sensible words of Waller: " His enemies would not 
 consent to the duke's reigning in his turn, so his friends have 
 got him to reign before his turn, while his brother is still alive." 
 The duke, on his side, found great satisfaction in displaying 
 his omnipotence in the eyes of his enemies; he was seen in 
 the streets of London with a considerable train, while the 
 king went out with but a very limited suite. His antechambers 
 were crowded, while the king could scarcely collect a few 
 courtiers with whom to converse. It was the duke, and not 
 the king, whose morning and evening levees were attended. 
 He presided at the council, despatched all business, and the 
 king merely signed the papers which were brought to him, and 
 of which he rarely inquired the contents, as much from pique 
 as from indifference. 
 
 The duke resumed his post of high-admiral. This was the 
 first blow struck at that famous church of England test which 
 had overthrown the Cabal ministry. Several catholic lords, 
 detained in the Tower since the popish plot, now quitted it, 
 and had a brilliant reception at court. Titus Oates was tried 
 for having calumniated the duke of York in his evidence, and 
 condemned to perpetual confinement. The duke of Beaufort 
 and lord Peterborough instituted prosecutions of the same 
 kind against such of the reveal er s of the plot as still lived, 
 and had them imprisoned. At the same time began those 
 conversions to popery, which became the understood means of 
 obtaining favour at court. The Irish lord Mac-Carthy, one 
 of the popish oificers whom the church of England test had 
 obliged to leave the army, re-entered it with a higher com- 
 mand; other officers abjured protestantism, and were ad- 
 vanced accordingly. For several months nothing was heard 
 of at the French court but the successes obtained by the 
 catholic missionaries sent from all parts to aid the York party. 
 They corresponded with father Lachaise, formerly compromised 
 by the letters of the Jesuit Coleman; it was even announced 
 that Charles would shortly set his people the example of re- 
 turning to the Romish church. An ignorant Jesuit who had 
 obtained an audience with him, took his badinage about the 
 
1685.] LITERARY PERSECUTIONS. 183 
 
 church of England as a declaration of preference for Catho- 
 licism; and he wrote word that he had hold of the king of 
 England, and Louis XIV. spoke at Versailles of this conver- 
 sion as of a settled fact. 
 
 The York party did not confine itself to supporting the 
 labours of the popish priests; it arduously laboured to pro- 
 pagate the principles of absolute power. During the pro- 
 ceedings against the Rye House conspirators, the university 
 of Oxford had been directed to seek out and condemn in the 
 publications anterior to the parliament of Oxford, in those 
 which had attained any celebrity in the time of the revolution, 
 and even in the Old Testament, the maxims which were 
 charged with having given birth to all the enterprises against 
 royalty. The university had accordingly denounced as cor- 
 rupt, impious, and seditious twenty-seven propositions taken 
 from the writings of Hobbes, Milton, Godwin, Baxter, Bu- 
 chanan, Knox, Johnson, and other less known writers; some 
 of these were republican professions of faith, which few people 
 now thought of maintaining; others were a timid exposition, 
 of the principle of resistance: this, for example, taken from a 
 celebrated pamphlet of Samuel Johnson: — 
 
 " Christians are not bound to observe passive obedience, 
 when the prince commands anything contrary to the laws of 
 the land. If the first Christians chose rather to die than to 
 resist, it was because the Christian religion was not estab- 
 lished by the laws of the empire." And this, from the work 
 of Philip Hunton on Limited Monarchy. " Sovereignty in 
 England dwelleth in the three estates — king, lords, and 
 commons. The king hath power in degree equal to that of 
 the two houses : the houses may contradict and oppose 
 him." 
 
 The zealous Anglicans of the university of Oxford had con- 
 demned these maxims, as leading to those which had influ- 
 enced Russell and Sidney; but the doctrines which they had 
 thus established in the common interest of their religion and 
 of royalty were now converted into a popish weapon. The 
 courts of justice, taking their cue from these dicta, condemned 
 as seditious the writings of a time, when men rose against 
 the measure that deprived the towns and corporations of their 
 charters, and against the favour which the papists openly en- 
 
184 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1684- 
 
 joyed. In the course of the year 1684, thirty-two writers 
 were condemned to the pillory for protests of this kind, de- 
 signated as factious, and injurious to the king and to the duke 
 of York; some had merely required the convocation of a par- 
 liament, in the terms of the declaration of Oxford. The 
 suspension of three years, to which the nation had seemed 
 resigned, had now expired 1 . 7 ' ba «f 
 
 The duke of York and the papists hoped that the king 
 would not keep to his promise, and when the question was 
 discussing in the council, they asserted that the declaration 
 was in no way binding upon him. But the whigs were rlcr 
 longer formidable. Those of the tories who were not papists 
 began to be alarmed, and the conduct of the cluke was in all 
 respects so intemperate, that the tories thought he might at 
 length shake off a yoke which had become insupportable, and 
 declare against a policy not his own. The misunder- 
 standing between the two brothers, long veiled by skilful dis- 
 simulation, broke out the moment that the one refused to 
 be led by the other. Several very warm altercations took 
 place between them. ; ' The king's expressions got abroad lI JËi J? 
 became known that on one occasion he said to the dtfkte: 
 " You may, if you will, résume your journey ings on the con- 
 tinent; for mvself, T am too old to stir, and shall remain 
 where I am."' That on another, driven to extreniit^ 1 M 1 
 went so far as to say: "There is no middle course: bri8 qf. 
 the two brothers must take a journey, and that One mt\st.4S5i xa 
 be the eldest W^ uo ^ BJaiqeq edi {levsYroU m 9iôw 
 
 As soonVs'tlffi^ court «rfef* 
 
 the theatre oft^slff¥6Win^^ has nof/M&ferfH 1 * 
 
 at all explained; The duke of Monmouth, who after the affair of 
 the Rye House had thought it advisable to retire to Holland, 
 and who, again received into favour notwithstanding his ab- 
 sence, kept up a secret correspondence with the king his 
 father, came to England, unknown to the dtike of Ydr&^Ot 
 to London, but to a place within easy reach of the king's mes- 
 sengers. All that was known of his visit at the time, was, 
 that having fulfilled it, he returned to Holland wit h every 
 appearance of satisfaction; but it was afterwards ascertained 
 that Charles liàd given his consent to a project to assemble a 
 parliament, to give an important command to the duke of 
 
1685.] DEATH OF CHARLES II. 18& 
 
 Monmouth, to exile the duke of York, and again to put in 
 force the laws against the papists. 
 
 The duchess of Portsmouth, hostile, as the king's mistress, to the 
 duke of York, and the ministers Sunderland and Halifax, aided 
 this project with their influence and their talents for intrigue. 
 Barillon, whom some historians represent as opposed, others, as 
 favourable to the king's views, and whose conduct, always equi- 
 vocating and obscure, cannot be cleared up by what remains of 
 his correspondence, was, it would on the whole appear, charged, 
 on the part of the duke of York and the papists, to promise 
 Charles, if he would not assemble parliament, the continuation of 
 the subsidy which he had received since the affair of Oxford, and 
 which, guaranteed for three years, was now about to expire. 
 At the same time, to propitiate the duchess of Portsmouth, her 
 son, the duke of Richmond, -was naturalized in France and 
 endowed with a brilliant apanage. Despite all this, Charles 
 seemed fixed in the resolution to deliver himself from the im- 
 portunities of the duke, and the demands of the papists, when 
 he was all at once seized with some extraordinary malady, in 
 the midst of apparently perfect health, and died in a few days. 
 
 The bishops of the church of England, and the catholic 
 priests, beset him in his last moments, disputing, as for a poli- 
 tical victory, the advantage of seeing him die in .their respec- 
 tive faiths. - The impenetrable secrecy which surrounded the 
 bed of the dying monarch, precluded the public from any po- 
 sitive knowledge as to whether the protestants or the catholics 
 were best received. However, the papists loudly boasted of 
 the conversion of the king, while the event itself closed 
 the lips of their adversaries. The examination of the body 
 presented indications of poison. One of the physicians had 
 the imprudence to express his suspicions, and died a few days 
 after, declaring that he believed himself a victim of his 
 candour. The stomach, that part of the remains whose 
 examination was most to be dreaded, was secretly removed. 
 The papists and the duke of York were accused. As is 
 ever the case in such matters, the fact that they had a strong 
 interest in this sudden death of Charles, sufficed to throw the 
 suspicion of that death upon them. We have already ex- 
 pressed an opinion as to the distrust in which party statements, 
 ever readily accepted by the populace, should beheld; if there 
 
186 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 be, as to this affair, some odious secret which cannot be pene- 
 trated, it is probable that James, at least, knew nothing of it. 
 As to the catholics, the question with them was, whether they 
 should re-establish their religion, or again be involved in the 
 horrible persecutions which had followed the popish plot; 
 Charles was about to sacrifice them a second time, in order to 
 make his peace with England; the death of the king so far 
 directed the crisis in their favour. If the death of Charles was 
 natural, fortune served them well; if it was their work, they 
 did that which no other parties would have hesitated to do in 
 the same position. To triumph, that is the whole moral of 
 parties. 
 
 The duke of York and the Jesuits who directed him, paid 
 too little heed to the accusation; contemptuous denial did 
 not put an end to it, and, as corroborating it, various circum- 
 stances were remarked, which testified the indifference of the 
 new court for the late king. The body did not lay in state 
 as usual. The operation of embalming was performed so 
 negligently, that for several days, parts of the entrails which 
 had not been replaced were seen issuing from the gutter be- 
 neath the room where the corpse lay; finally, the funeral 
 obsequies were inferior to those of a simple lord. The duke 
 of York, speaking in his Memoirs of this unusual absence of 
 royal pomp, says, that what was retrenched in the ceremony 
 rendered it more conformable with that Christian humility 
 which even princes may not dispense with. The king's eyes 
 were scarcely closed, when this prince, the least humble of men, 
 received with delight the homage of the servilely assiduous 
 courtiers; he was proclaimed in London, by the title of James II. 
 
 No opposition was manifested. The feeling which had 
 formerly dictated the bill of exclusion still lived in men's 
 hearts, but a profound dejection retained it there. All waited 
 with anxiety to hear what this enemy of the public liberties 
 and of the national religion would say now that, the crown 
 upon his head, he could throw aside dissimulation; but, in 
 this rapid change of position, a glance cast by James at the 
 difficulty of enterprises which he had boldly attempted under 
 the shelter of a throne occupied by his brother, made him 
 sensible of the necessity for caution, and, to the astonishment 
 of all sects and all parties, he delivered the following speech 
 
1686.] james's speech to the council. 187 
 
 to the council : " I have been reputed to be a man for arbi- 
 trary power, but that is not the only story that has been made 
 of me; and I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this 
 government both in church and state, as it is now by law 
 established. I know the principles of the church of England 
 are for monarchy, and the members of it have showed them- 
 selves good and loyal subjects; therefore I shall always take 
 care to defend and support it. I know, too, that the laws of 
 England are sufficient to make the king as great a monarch 
 as I could wish; and as I shall never depart from the just 
 right and prerogative of the crown, so I shall never invade 
 any man's property. I have often heretofore ventured my 
 life in defence of the nation, and I shall still go as far as any 
 man in preserving it in all its just rights and privileges." 
 
 These expressions naturally appeared most gentle to the 
 nation, coming from a sovereign whom it had not the power 
 to reject, and whom it had so deeply offended in reference to 
 the papists, and the exclusion bill; it preferred a belief in his 
 intentions to the apprehension of the revenge it knew itself 
 to have provoked, and it became necessary for it to appear 
 convinced, in order to confirm the new king in the dispositions 
 he had evinced. Accordingly, from all parts of the kingdom 
 came addresses, which, as usual, expressed more of joy than 
 was supported by hope. The protestations of devotion and 
 affection were in anticipation of what it was desired the king 
 might thereafter merit, rather than base flatteries. Some 
 addresses indeed, in thanking the king for his assurances with 
 regard to religion, added: "that religion which is dearer to 
 us than life;" others, speaking of the public liberties, reminded 
 him that they were guaranteed by the laws. Such at this 
 time was the depression of the public mind, that these timid 
 observations appeared to some very courageous, and to others 
 indecent, as insisting too strongly upon promises which the 
 king sincerely meant to keep. James, at his coronation, 
 repeated these same promises; he swore to maintain the con- 
 stitution and the Anglican church; but he takes care in his 
 Memoirs to explain with what mental reservation, while taking 
 this latter part of the oath, he knew how to render it futile: 
 "his majesty," he says, "here undertook to support and 
 defend rather those who professed this religion, than the 
 
188 HISTORY OF THÉ COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [I680- 
 
 religion itself. It could not be imagined that lié should feel 
 himself bound in conscience to support that which in con- 
 science he judged to be erroneous; and therefore, in making 
 usé of the expressions he thought fit to adopt, he did not for 
 a moment suppose that the public would conceive them in 
 any other sense than that which he himself meant to convey, 
 the only sense consistent with his position." On the second 
 Sunday after the coronation, James publicly attended mass, 
 and officially despatched an envoy to Home. He at the same 
 time published two writings 1 which he pretended he had found 
 among^ his brother's papers, and which went to prove that the 
 king had died sincerely convinced of the truths of Catholicism. 
 No one believed in the authenticity of these two pieces ; but 
 their publication showed how far, as to religion, the king 
 intended to' keep his woM. 9011 ^ 8BW jI Aaa[ 9V / 7ÏJ 
 
 : Ât court the papists' experienced the most distinguished 
 reception. Yet with all the marked preference of which 
 tMë^wlétè the object, James did not think it advisable to 
 ^fe^trlèm^tit the head ; of the government; he only gave 
 4&eïn Wë offices of his household, retaining v in the public posts 
 thfrèë'wnb had filled them under '- the late ; king since the par- 
 liament of Oxford. Halifax continued f; president of the 
 council, "Sunderland secretary of state; James even spared 
 them the embarrassment of the explanations which they re- 
 qitësik^i^Vé lltÈ^mfflfiHP fe&riër ^dnftW^^d-vi^ard^^îin. 
 
 shown. ■ People were : astonished 'that an àdminis- 
 
 ^Hriciplës- to the personal J devotion which they had already 
 r given him many proofsW. Besides, everything in so false a 
 position was necessarily contradictory. James thought it due 
 to his religious sentiments not to conceal his predilection for 
 the catholics, and to his interest to leave in the government 
 men who would reassure the nation under its terrors of 
 
1686.] POLICY OF JAMES. 189 
 
 popery. Having from chief of a party become king, he 
 seemed desirous of banishing passion, -and of elevating him- 
 self to high conceptions; but imagination prevailed where 
 mere reason would have been a better counsellor. To recon- 
 cile the nation to absolute power and to Catholicism was. in 
 his eyes, a task worthy of a great and pious monarch. He 
 hoped that powerful habits, inveterate repugnances, fears still 
 more inveterate, would by degrees give gently way, and. that 
 then he might display, upon a throne respected by its, sub- 
 jects, and protector of the only true faith, political and 
 military talents. -which should distinguish him among princes, 
 and again elevate -the nation in the eyes of Europe. froif«oaii 
 
 If we are to believe the Memoirs of James, although three 
 years younger than his brother, he had never believe^^ 
 should survive him. It was hence that new ideas came upon 
 him with .his unhoped-for change of fortune^ that which he 
 had advised or desired as duke of York, he now regarded 
 under another aspect ; he wdio had recently so . vehemently 
 opposed the assembling of a parliament, now as king deemed it 
 an indispensable measure. Moreover,.; as under the. last reign 
 it was necessary for the requirements of government to have 
 recourse to arbitrary taxation, to the national, rep resent at j^reg, 
 or to the patronage of Louis .XIV..: now what the nation 
 had most of all detested in Charles, was that dependence 
 upon, a foreigner to which that monarch had so basely j^ub- 
 mitted. In his first relations with France, James affectait 
 hauteu$ t w^h greatly amused Louis, w^ ^.ihe^yery time 
 was being secretly m^p^ t by Barillon to take pity on, tfip 
 embarrassments of the new king, and to continue to him the 
 supplies granted to Charles. Louis temporized, which was 
 equivalent to a refusal; James, then kept up his air of inde- 
 pendence, and announced the immediate.convocation gf^g^- 
 liament; but pursuing the policy h^Bfl^fjunselled after the 
 aflair. of Oxford, he thought it better first to assemble the 
 Scottish parliament, in order that this might set j an example 
 of docility, which it did not fail to do. ,V ^ f " vnjiflI ffi 
 
 j The earl of Queensbmy and lord Perth w/ere still at the head 
 of aifairs in that kingdom, and governed with that harsjmess 
 wliich most of their .predecessors, for forty. years past/^ftd 
 declared necessary to the maintenance of ord^r. There was, 
 
190 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 however, this difference between the two ministers, that the 
 former imposed upon his royalist zeal the restrictions with 
 which every member of the church of England then thought 
 to shield himself, and the other was one of the most ardent 
 abettors of popery. The parliament which they directed 
 went rather with Queensbury, as is shown by an act stamped 
 with vivid anxieties for the Anglican religion, and which 
 seemed out of its place by the side of two other acts, the one 
 acknowledging the absolute power of the king in the govern- 
 ment of the state, the other imposing new punishments upon 
 those who should form conventicles. Upon the whole, how- 
 ever, James had to congratulate himself upon the conduct 
 of the Scottish parliament. He hoped no less from the 
 English parliament. Never had intrigue and violence been 
 employed by the court more unblushingly, or more suc- 
 cessfully, than in the current elections. According to the 
 charters given at the end of the last reign, in exchange for 
 those which had been surrendered, it was no longer the people 
 but the corporations who elected, and means had been found 
 to expel from the corporations most of the men capable of 
 any vigorous steps. In towns and boroughs, where, in con- 
 sequence of these clearances, the corporations did not furnish 
 a sufficient number of electors, the officers of the army or 
 gentlemen of known devotion to the cause were made to vote. 
 Thus there was a lower house, in which, with the exception 
 of forty members, there were none but weak, ignorant, or 
 unscrupulous men, similar to those who, in the first two 
 years of the restoration, had given up the liberties and money 
 of the people with such baseness and improvidence. In one 
 thing alone their representatives, unworthy as they were of 
 the public confidence, did not see with the eyes of the court ; 
 they dreaded popery, and this sentiment formed the only 
 hope of the minority, who had been duly elected, despite all 
 the machinations and violence of power. 
 
 The administration preserved by James did not conduct 
 affairs; its official existence w r as little better than a form. 
 The power of the papists, on the other hand, did not consist 
 in the possession of such or such posts, but in the elevation 
 of a prince who had never ceased to conspire with them. 
 The orders which he dictated to the council were those which 
 
1686.] PROSECUTION OF OATES. 191 
 
 the directors of his conscience had previously sanctioned; 
 these were the true ministers, who had practical cognizance 
 of all public affairs, through the obscure medium of a police, 
 which everywhere superintended and influenced the autho- 
 rities, high and low. The existence of this secret govern- 
 ment was revealed by the nature of the prosecutions instituted 
 at this period by the courts of justice. Their chief occupa- 
 tion, after the accession of James, was to reinstate or revenge 
 the papists, by j udgments exactly opposed to those of which 
 they had been the object under the preceding reign. Titus 
 Oates, already condemned as having calumniated the duke of 
 York in some of his depositions, was again tried as a false 
 witness; Jeffreys, who in 1678 was one of the king's counsel 
 employed to give effect to testimony against the papists, 
 now prepared the indictment against Oates, and denounced 
 him as the greatest impostor that had ever appeared on the 
 face of the earth. The cause was brought before an ordinary 
 court, but judges and juries were either intimidated or pur- 
 chased, and the sentence was dictated by the papists. It did 
 not suit their purpose to execute Oates, as the unhappy man 
 himself would perhaps have preferred; he was condemned to 
 be pilloried, to be whipped for several consecutive days at a 
 cart's tail, from one end of London to the other, a punishment 
 which was to be repeated every year, at the anniversary of 
 the denunciation of the popish plot. It was hoped that, me- 
 naced by this extended prospect of torture, he would retract, 
 but, exciting our wonder to the last, he suffered and kept his 
 secret. On the first two days, he was whipped with such 
 barbarous severity, that the people regarded it as a miracle 
 and as a confirmation of the truth of his depositions, that he 
 did not die under the hand of the executioner. 
 
 Dangerfield, the denouncer of the Meal Tub plot, condemned 
 to the same punishment, was killed by one of the mob in re- 
 turning from the pillory. Baxter, the presbyterian minister, 
 was also brought to trial. He was one of those whose writings 
 had recently been condemned by the university of Oxford; some 
 of these were anterior to the restoration, the rest published 
 since the popish plot. Baxter was condemned to an enormous 
 fine, and to perpetual imprisonment. Jeffreys, in the course 
 of the trial, addressed him thus: — " Richard, Richard, dost 
 
192 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 thou think we will hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou 
 art an old fellow, an old knave; thou hast written books 
 enough to load a cart; everyone is as full of sedition (I might 
 say treason) as an egg is full of meat : hadst thou been whipt 
 out of thy writing trade forty years ago, it had been happy. 
 Thou pretendest to be a preacher of the gospel of peace, and 
 thou hast one foot in the grave; it is time for thee to begin to 
 think what account thou intendest to give; but leave thee to 
 thyself, and I see thou wilt go on as thou hast begun; but by 
 the grace of God, I'll look after thee. I know^ thou hast a mighty 
 party, and I see a great many of the brotherhood in corners, 
 waiting to see what will become of their mighty Don, and 
 a doctor of the party (looking at Dr. Bates) at your elbow; 
 but by the grace of Almighty God I will crush you all." 
 
 Nothing was heard of but prosecutions and condemnations 
 of this kind. When parliament assembled, James spoke in 
 well-nigh the same terms that he made use of to the privy 
 council; he enlarged upon the interests of commerce in a 
 manner which proved that he was well acquainted with such 
 matters. He disclosed his intentions very clearly, by saying 
 that the best mode of inducing him frequently to assemble 
 parliament, would be for it to use him well; and that those 
 would calculate ill who should think, by closely pressing him, 
 to obtain more from him. Parliament answered with sub- 
 mission, and even mentioned the word gratitude; in a few 
 hours it voted the continuation to the new king of the civil 
 list granted in the late reign, in addition to the revenues he 
 had enjoyed as duke of York, in all nearly 2,500,000/., a sum 
 more than double that which had been voted by the first par- 
 liament of the restoration. James had already illegally raised 
 that portion of these revenues furnished by the excise duties; 
 parliament sanctioned this anticipation. Some objections, 
 indeed, were raised, but were not listened to. Various peti- 
 tions which denounced electioneering frauds were rejected; 
 they were addressed to the very men who owed their election 
 to the nefarious means complained of. 
 
 Thus from the outset men saw what was to be expected 
 from parliament; no one ventured to hope that it would de- 
 fend religion. The perils were the same with those in which 
 they had been involved shortly before the popish plot; but 
 
1686.] 
 
 PROGRESS OF TYRANNY. 
 
 193 
 
 the energy by which these perils had been averted, had led 
 to the very errors which it was now intended to expiate; 
 men feeling less courage, flattered themselves that they had 
 ail the more wisdom and experience. TThen James, scarcely 
 crowned, ordered the illegal collection .of the excise, the 
 example of Hampden was vainly cited; no one was found 
 willing to incur the risks of a prosecution for resistance in 
 the name of the nation; each shut himself up in his own in- 
 terests, terrible enemies of the _ public interest when this is 
 no longer regarded as their faithful expression. The auda- 
 city of the papists was encouraged by this fatal inertness; 
 they brought into parliament a bill denouncing as iniquitous 
 the condemnation in virtue of which the earl of Stafford had 
 been put to death in 16S0, This was a distinct insult to the 
 upper, house, for it called upon them i<Keohàemm*héir own 
 decree, but the bill passed. iThme, a iio wever^ who had 
 voted against it, placed upon the journals a protest, founded on 
 the principle that a judgment given by the„ upper house could 
 not be invalidated by an inferior court; that no: proof was 
 adduced of the pretended innocence of lord Staffibrd;- finally, 
 upon the ground that the popish plot, condemned and prose- 
 cuted, after mature deliberations, by -the Me king and four 
 consecutive parliaments, could not be noilniedtitïeTfely btat of 
 attachment for a popish sovereign. .xnNone but men placed in 
 so high a social position could then hold such language. 
 Erantie violence couldilonly gfareriiliieraoom^eofMdespair to 
 those, jwjifo fife this time* tMe^biedist ikhee>v.ery>3imiii'e of <$ef&eys$ 
 such açtsjfOÉ.^Me^cftfwei^liex^iteÂrfiy 'taattempt from witfe^ 
 out, m<k Vjtisy.* speedily brought forth their: fruitsib usidl siom 
 The.itekfe of Môntnoutlv:,tfie earijjof lArgyle, and the 
 numerous r^efugâes whoji just befom thes d«eath of Charles IL, 
 had thought themsefcesqomirth^ over 
 
 the duke ro£ r Yock to^tt3afei$api$^sy saw .aU-.rtbein htopes de- 
 stroyed by the aceessi^UT^in «James. l> ; They - >could scarcely 
 reckon on a further refuge in /Holland; James would require 
 their expulsion thence ofihiB.so<a4ififtlaw-, the prince of Orange, 
 and he, now the- heir presumptive to the crown of England, 
 had no interest in supporting them. The pretension sy indeed 
 of the duke of Monmouth were becoming more than ever 
 rivals of his own. Most of the refugees having quitted Scot- 
 land and England at a time when the whig party, notwith- 
 
 o 
 
194 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 standing its defeats, still retained courage and hope, judged 
 from these old dispositions what might still be the hatred of 
 the papists and of the court; they thought that they had only 
 to present themselves with arms to find soldiers, and ac- 
 cordingly resolved upon a double descent, the one on the 
 west of Scotland, the other on the west of England. The 
 earl of Argyle departed first for Scotland, with three small 
 vessels freighted with arms for five thousand men; the duke 
 of Monmouth, detained by preparations on somewhat a larger 
 scale, set out afterwards. The secret had not been completely 
 kept; so that, when the earl of Argyle arrived in Scotland, 
 the earl of Perth and the duke of Queensbury, already on 
 their guard, had assembled at Edinburgh all the nobility of 
 the western counties, and had taken other measures for 
 isolating the earl of Argyle upon his disembarkation. Ac* 
 cordingly the earl found all those places closed against him 
 where he had reckoned upon establishing himself. Some 
 thousands of highlanders, his vassals, whom he collected, soon 
 left him, when they found that the royal troops, the militia 
 of the surrounding counties, and the vassals of several great 
 noblemen, foes to the earl, were marching against them. A few 
 friends, who would not separate their fortune from his, were 
 taken with him. He was carried to Edinburgh, and executed 
 in pursuance of the sentence passed upon him three years 
 before. 
 
 The duke of Monmouth, detained nineteen days by con- 
 trary winds, landed at Lyme in Dorsetshire, at this juncture 
 of affairs. The period of his quitting Holland was known, 
 but he was not expected to appear in this direction. The 
 news of his landing produced great alarm in London. He 
 was personally far more formidable than the forces which 
 accompanied him. He assumed the title of king, a title 
 under which a large proportion of the population, in its hatred 
 for popery, was quite capable of recognising him on his very 
 first success, especially in the parts where he presented him- 
 self. The duke had not a hundred men with him when he 
 landed, but he had before him, wherein to advance into the 
 country and to recruit, a full fortnight, which the king, on 
 his side, occupied in summoning from Scotland the troops 
 who had frustrated the enterprise of Argyle, and from Holland 
 three English and Scottish regiments, who had been in the 
 service of the States since the peace of 1678. 
 
1686.] 
 
 BATTLE OF SEDGMOOR. 
 
 195 
 
 The prince of Orange offered to place himself at the head 
 of these regiments, and himself to come and oppose the duke 
 of Monmouth. James suspected, and with sufficient reason, 
 the intentions of the prince, who was capable, did the English 
 encourage him, of seizing the crown for himself, after he had 
 defeated him who came to contest it with James II. The 
 three regiments arrived alone; but from the language of the 
 officers and soldiers upon their way, the king judged it better 
 not to employ them against the duke, and only sent the few 
 troops over whom he had, in the last three years, gained an 
 influence. Lord Feversham, nephew of Turenne, commanded 
 this small army, raised the militia, appointed over them papist 
 officers, and marched against the duke of Monmouth. The 
 latter had collected nearly six thousand men, undisciplined 
 peasants, but whom his presence rendered capable of great 
 efforts. His manifestoes summoned to arms all Englishmen 
 friends of the constitution, overthrown by arbitrary power, 
 and of the protestant religion, about to succumb under the 
 blows of the papists. They only gave the title of duke of 
 York to the king; treated his accession as usurpation, charged 
 him with all the crimes attributed to the papists, from the 
 fire of London to the seizure of the charters; declared that 
 Russell, Sidney, justice Godfrey, the earl of Essex, and the 
 late king himself, had died by the steel, the poison, and the 
 calumnies of the popish friends of the duke of York ; and that 
 it was to avenge and deliver the people, and not because of 
 personal injuries, that the men proscribed by the duke and 
 the papists had taken arms. Monmouth passed through the 
 towns of Lyme, Axminster, Taunton, and Bridgewater, 
 everywhere well received by the people, while the royal 
 officers and magistrates retired. If he had given less time to 
 the pleasure of hearing the popular acclamations, and had 
 marched to attack lord Feversham when he had the advan- 
 tage of numbers, the ardour of his peasants would have fitly 
 punished the usurpation and the crimes of James II. ; but he 
 did this too late. He attacked the royal troops at Sedgmoor by 
 night, thinking to surprise them. Lord Feversham, however, 
 had already managed to procure intelligence from some of the 
 rebels, and was therefore on his guard. After a few hours' 
 fighting, the army of Monmouth fled, leaving a thousand 
 men on the field of battle, and fifteen hundred prisoners. 
 
 o2 
 
196 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 The peasantry had fought with fierce determination; but the 
 prince's officers had ill fulfilled their duty;, some, indeed, had 
 betrayed him, as was manifest by their conduct in the battle, 
 and by the pardon which they afterwards obtained. 
 
 The papists, who had been thoroughly alarmed 5 were im- 
 placable in their revenge; and as the population, except in 
 the places actrMly visited by the duke of Monmouth, had 
 shown neither devotion to the king, nor enthusiasm for the 
 duke, they determined to punish it for the covert intentions 
 which they discerned in this kind of neutrality. The duke 
 of Monmouth, in a flight as full of adventure as that of the 
 king his father; -aCft ex Worcester, had the misfortune to be 
 taken, and was brought to London. Tie employed all the in- 
 fluence which his court connexions, and his exalted family 
 relations had lbfl*him,[ after a war full of so much hatred, to 
 induce James to admit him to his presence. James con- 
 sented; he wished to see his nephew at ; his feet, to hear him 
 retract his. accusations, to learn whether , he. had any secret 
 accomplices, and to draw from him a written declaration that; 
 it was falsely and traitorously that Jae had . asserted the ex- 
 istence of a private marriage between his mother and the 
 late king. Monmouth assented -, to -every thing, -in order to 
 save his life,: which he solicited ^vith' tears. Still young, he 
 loved it; he bad known, it brilliant; with illusions, animated 
 with the pleasures' ;o£ -a voluptuous court ; he, stijl^ lio$ed for 
 happy days; his rank, his fortune, his : talents,. ,-j&& graces of 
 his mind and person, alL heldl^jtit t^fibjfni ft§iç {I p^oij4|^, ; and 
 would bury in oblivion the base compliances of which he v. as 
 now guiltyuf t ^.e^Q^tiiitj^iih^^fi^^^i^ ^a^dojèjOb^ained 
 from his mortal enenvyy [ seined preferable to the fearful 
 doubts which agitated xMm? of [annihilation.- .jj^mes, after a 
 long aîidi^neê, -deipising that weakness which to others would 
 have seemed -tojuiching, refused the pardon; delighted, how- 
 ever,, thdt itMrad, been thus solicited. The duke met death 
 with the dosage of indignation, and, despite the importu- 
 nities of the €QÛrt bishops, would not testify upon the scaf- 
 fold any other regret than that of having involved hrave 
 men in a fruitless; death for .his; cause, the cause of liberty, 
 and of the protestait i?e%ion^-gnGfi 319 
 
 There had also been brought to London,. to be (questioned 
 by the king, a Scottish gentleman, named Cochrane, and an* 
 
1686.] fate of monmouth's adherents. 197 
 
 English presbyterian, named Ayloff ; both of them taken 
 with the earl of Argyle. The admissions of Cochrane, and 
 the enormous sums of money given by his family to the 
 priests in credit at court, saved his life. Ayloff, brought 
 into the presence of James, the king asked him to declare 
 what he knew of the relations between the whigs of the 
 kingdom and the conspirators abroad? V Mr. Ayloff," said 
 the king, " you know it is in my power to pardon you; 
 therefore say that which may deserve it." " Sir," replied 
 Ayloff, '1 it is in your poweiv but it is not in your nature." 
 Ayloff* was executed. 
 
 Rurnbold, also taken with the earl of Argyle, and reco- 
 gnised as one of the Rye House conspirators, denied that the 
 project of assassinating the late king and the duke of York 
 had ever been seriously discussed. He added: " This is a 
 deluded generation, veiled with ignorance, that though popery 
 and slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; 
 though I am sure there was no man born marked of God 
 above another; for none come into the world with a saddle 
 on his back, nor any booted and spurred to ride him." Rum- 
 bold was executed at Edinburgh. 
 
 Lord Grey, who had commanded the duke of Monmouth's 
 cavalry at Sedgmoor, was pardoned; a pardon generally re- 
 garded as the price of treachery during the action. Hamp- 
 den, who-was concerned with lord Grey in the Rye House 
 plot, was spared, of which he was afterwards so ashamed that 
 he killed' himself. The trial of some other personages of 
 distinction was postponed. 
 
 But there was neither delay nor clemency for the people of 
 the western counties. Jeffreys, lately elevated to the peerage, 
 was sent with a discretionary commission;. to seek out the 
 guilty. He was assisted by four other judges as pitiless as 
 himself, and by a body of troops, under the orders of the 
 ferocious soldier, colonel Kirke. The latter took charge of 
 the rebels who Were found with arms in their, hands; for them 
 there were not even the forms of trial. Kirke would give 
 his officers a grand dinner: on the removal of the cloth 
 the health of the king and queen was drunk, and, at this 
 signal, the executioners hanged, under the very eyes of the 
 guests, and to the sound of military instruments, the latest 
 prisoners, whose dying agonies merely excited hideous mirth. 
 
 3 
 
198 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 Jeffreys had the people who were suspected of having favoured 
 the rebellion brought before him in groups of twenty or 
 thirty. After some brutal abuse, he would say to them: "I 
 know all; save me the annoyance of tracing it home to you; 
 confess yourselves guilty, it's your only chance." Some con- 
 fessed ; others denied. Most frequently Jeffreys passed a 
 common sentence, and always in terms as coarse as they were 
 bloodthirsty. He thus put to death nearly six hundred per- 
 sons, mostly of humble condition. The inferior agents and 
 the executioners trembled as they obeyed him. Their confu- 
 sion often gave occasion to frightful mistakes; men whose 
 pardon had been purchased at court, perished, taken by 
 chance. These, according to Jeffreys, were small matters 
 compared with the realization of such prompt and efficient 
 justice. The proscription not only reached those whom the 
 presence of the duke of Monmouth had seduced; those who 
 had given refuge to the fugitive insurgents perished as their 
 accomplices, Two women were of this number; one was an 
 aged and charitable anabaptist, well known m London for the 
 care which sick persons and prisoners of all sects received 
 from her; she was burned alive. The other was a noble 
 lady, the widow of a regicide, lord Lisle, himself assassinated 
 in Holland by some Irish catholics, in the first year of the 
 restoration. She also was condemned to the stake, but the 
 king consented to commute this sentence of the lord chief 
 justice for a milder one; and lady Lisle was only decapitated. 
 Cornish, who had been sheriff of London in the year of the 
 popish plot, and whose misfortune it was to have made him- 
 self conspicuous in that too noted affair, was hanged and 
 quartered, for no other reason than the circumstance which, 
 allowed vengeance to be taken upon him. 
 
 The king knew of all these barbarities: he related them to 
 the foreign ambassadors, under the inconceivable idea of 
 inspiring them with the same interest which his own grati- 
 fied hate found in them; he amused himself with giving 
 them the reports of what he called Jeffreys' campaign. He 
 pretends, in his Memoirs, that many of the acts of violence 
 which excited the highest popular indignation, came to his 
 knowledge too late, and that the rebels were chastised with 
 clemency wherever he himself could see to it; but the very 
 name of clemency from the pen as in the mouth of James, 
 
1686.] RESISTANCE OF PARLIAMENT. 199 
 
 makes us shudder when we know that he believed he held 
 from God the full right to sacrifice to his safety all the 
 enemies of his power, a right which the long parliament itself, 
 amid the greatest dangers incurred by the revolution, had 
 never asserted. It is, therefore, not to the revolution, nor 
 even to the tyranny of Laud and Strafford, that we must look 
 for anything comparable with these atrocities of a bigoted 
 and sanguinary court; we must go back to the reign of queen 
 Mary, and, perhaps, to that of Henry VIII. ; even there we 
 should not find a Jeffreys seated among the peers of the 
 realm, and raised to the dignity of chancellor, as this mon- 
 strous demoniac was, in recompence for these services. 
 
 After announcing the landing of Monmouth to parliament, 
 James had prorogued it from August to November. He 
 was already displeased with the tendencies manifested by the 
 two houses; for that which took place in the second parlia- 
 ment of the restoration was exactly reproduced in this. 
 After infinite acts of miserable baseness, of utter imprudence, 
 after the most servile protestations, both houses had shown 
 the firm resolution of maintaining the Anglican religion, and 
 of not admitting popery even as a tolerated religion. It 
 was for this reason that they refused to reinstate the memory 
 of lord Stafford, notwithstanding the contradiction between 
 thi3 refusal and the prosecution they allowed of Titus Oates 
 and Dangerfield; that which had always been found in pre- 
 vious resistances happened now; political pow r er was dis- 
 puted when there was reason to fear that it would be applied 
 to the subversion of. the national religion. 
 
 After the movement of the earl of Argyle in Scotland, the 
 court, taking as a pretext the dangers which threatened the 
 crown, brought into parliament a bill for the better protec- 
 tion of the king's person, which set forth all the acts that in 
 future should be deemed high-treason; w r hich acts, said the 
 bill, should all be held and taken to be treason, in whatso- 
 ever way manifested. One particular clause expressly pro- 
 vided against attacks upon the religion of the king and 
 falling back upon his person. It was this which excited those 
 who might have passed over the clauses which menaced the 
 press and the protestant pulpits; it was to the effect that all 
 persons convicted of having wickedly and malignantly, by 
 any writing, printing, preaching, or any other speaking, 
 
200 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 asserted or maintained any niaxims or doctrines tending to 
 excite the people, and to inspire them with hatred and ill-will 
 towards the government or person. of his majesty, should be 
 thenceforth incapable of holding any place or office, military, 
 civil, or ecclesiastical, or of exercising any employment in 
 church or state. 
 
 A celebrated lawyer, Maynard, demonstrated how easy it 
 would be, upon the letter of this provision, to expel from 
 public employments and from the churches, those who, faith- 
 ful to the Anglican religion, expressed the slightest objec- 
 tion to t;he religion professed by the king; for it would not 
 fail to, be said, that such attacks were intended to excite- 
 disaffection to his person. The house of commons there- 
 fore added this restrictive clause to the bill; namely: " that the 
 assei^tion and maintaining, by any writing, printing, preach- 
 ing, or other speaking, the doctrine, discipline, divine worship : 
 or government of the church of England, as it is now by law 
 established^, against popery or any other different or dissent- 
 ing opinions, is not intended and shall not be interpreted or 
 construed to be any offence within the words or meaning of this 
 act." This protected the members of the church of England 
 from the operation of the bij^ ri bi}tt flia nonconforming -pro- 
 testants remained exposed to them; no one represented them 
 in the ko use, and the members of the- church of England had 
 not yet resumed sufficient courage to remember that again st 
 popery the cause of all the; protestant £6Cjts tyas the same. 
 
 During j.the^oroga^ion. which followed the descent of 
 Monmon^th^^ e^$e ? £ting that the An- 
 
 glican opppsij jqn , would reaippear ancf , strengthen itself ? as l\ 
 under the late reign, prepared by its declamations: thjefdoxrarfj:; 
 fall of ^h^ iq&tfi rlT^M 1 $ïï§lY& $8%^. l^efoj^j hadtbeen -est abiishedi ; 
 despite . tjae : (Jabal ministry. The circumstance had i enabled 
 James to qniplpy against ^Iqhmo;Uth a great number of papist 
 officers, hitherto excluded from the army ; bat, the danger past ^ 
 the opposition^ thi^s of $&r members eft the. (d^cIi^ÊÉûgianilr: 
 was immediately, a^tidpa^edt tbey.-wo^ld MiMiss dçaiand 
 the rigorous execution of the laws ,^it^rtfee teâ%>aaafd iwouid 
 seek ta^gm^f^ ^^i^g^^fjgpitiye himself crtpt&e gërréicesTlof 
 men who / m J >1 fjt Iy Tps important forbMfib-lte h$®p around him. v, 
 The c^x^i^. a^lj^^sj^^rdingly everywhere spread it 
 abroad that the tests were the weapon of disaffected men; 
 
1686.] DISMISSAL OF HALIFAX AND QUEEN SBURY. 201 
 
 that to attempt by their means to oblige, not only the officers 
 of the army, but all the civil servants of the state, the minis- 
 ters, the members of the upper house, and the officers of the 
 crown, to declare that the religion of the king was idolatry, 
 was to offer the most monstrous insult to the monarch; that 
 the promise given by the king on his accession was a better 
 security for the Anglican religion than all the oaths taken by 
 other people. A few ambitious men allowed themselves to 
 be led away by these representations; the king had declared 
 that for the future he would only be served by men who 
 believed he might be relied upon without tests, and con- 
 spicuous conversions were made in the higher ranks of the 
 army, the magistracy, and the administration. But the lower 
 officers, the subordinate political employés, the inferior 
 magistrates, who had no greater favours to expect than the 
 retention of their places, would hear of no concession; they 
 saw that, the tests once abolished, they should be all dismissed 
 to make room for papists; and their religious belief, as well 
 as the fear of the contempt which attached to interested con- 
 versions, rendered them alike inaccessible to seduction and to 
 fear. 
 
 The king was resolved to make examples of some of those 
 who refused to subscribe to tli-e abolition of the tests, and whose 
 elevated position might give courage to the mass of civil and 
 military employes. The marquis of Halifax, president of the 
 council was looked upon as opposed to the measure solicited 
 by the Jesuits; James sent for him, and required him to de- 
 clare himself explicitly on the subject. Halifax without 
 hesitation replied, that he would hever lend his hand to the 
 abolition of the tests, because the tranquillity of the country, 
 that -was to say, its sense of security, and the interests of the 
 king himself, required, in ld3 opinion, their maintenance. 
 James tôld'faitaithat thenceforward he was no longer to con- 
 sider himself president of the council, since his service could 
 not be. fulfilled by ministers who were but half of his way o: 
 thinking. Halifax was replaced by Sunderland; who still 
 retained fcfe oMcê of secretaiy of state. 
 
 The duke of Queensbury fell into the same disgrace, and 
 was recalled from Scotland. The earl of Perth, who had 
 shared the government of Scotland 'with him, and who had 
 long since passed for a secret papist, publicly declared his 
 
 r 
 
202 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 conversion, and remained alone at the head of affairs in 
 Scotland. The marquis of Halifax and the duke of Queens- 
 bury had been, since the affair of Oxford, the one by his 
 duplicity of conduct, the other by his atrocious persecution of 
 the papists, objects of the contempt and hatred of both nations; 
 yet all they had to do in order to regain public favour was to 
 protest, by the sacrifice of their offices, against the views of 
 the Jesuit party: the reparation was tardy, but was considered 
 courageous, because in general men at heart considered them- 
 selves as guilty of tyranny in having supported or submitted 
 to it, as others were for having exereised it. 
 
 The duke of Ormond, lord lieutenant of Ireland, despite 
 his known fidelity, was recalled as a partisan of the tests. 
 The king had extensive view r s with regard to Ireland; the 
 protestant population there was more formidable than else- 
 where, because in presence of a catholic population much 
 more numerous, and still animated by the patriotic and re- 
 ligious hatred which had produced the insurrection of 1641, 
 it lived in continual danger. So long as the protestant 
 religion had not been openly attacked in England, the Irish 
 government had no other instructions given to it than those 
 transmitted at the restoration by the protectorate; the native 
 Irish, all catholics, had been strictly kept within the limits of 
 territory to which Cromwell had confined them; the descend- 
 ants of the settlers forcibly established in the country for two 
 centuries, and the sons of those whom the revolution had 
 there put in possession of large estates and fine mansions 
 taken from the catholics and from the partisans of the king, 
 had been throughout protected in their proprietary interests. 
 All that James, in the last years of his brother's reign, had 
 been able to do for the catholic population, was to send for 
 the young men of the great families to England, and to give 
 them commissions in the army; now himself master, he saw 
 before him a revolution to be effected, the same as that which 
 the insurgents of 1641 had attempted to effect by the massacre 
 of forty thousand English protestants. He resolved to raise 
 the Irish catholic race from its abasement ; to recruit the 
 English army from among its youth, now grovelling in igno- 
 rance, fanaticism, and misery, and thus to create for himself, 
 under the orders of popish officers, an entirely national army, 
 a powerful reserve for him should the English some day be- 
 
1686.] REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. 203 
 
 come less docile; he would then expel from Ireland the 
 proprietors who held their right from Cromwell, and who 
 formed in the great towns a citizen class infected, like that of 
 England, with ideas of political liberty, and still more hostile 
 even than the latter to popery. 
 
 The duke of Ormond was replaced by Clarendon, son of 
 the chancellor, and brother-in-law of James: the reasons 
 which induced the king to suppose he might depend upon 
 him have already been mentioned. He did not, however, 
 confide his projects to him; he rather, indeed, made use of 
 him to conceal them, for the attachment of Clarendon to the 
 Anglican religion being well known, his nomination would 
 reassure the protestants of Ireland, and it was important that 
 their suspicions should not yet be aroused. The person en- 
 trusted with the preparation of the popish revolution in Ire- 
 land, and with organizing troops who might come, when the 
 proper time arrived, to the assistance of James in England, 
 was a popish officer named Talbot, created earl of Tyrconnel 
 by the king. He was a man of capacity and vigour of cha- 
 racter, which rendered him well suited to carry out what was 
 practicable in the plans of the ruling faction; but if it was 
 the intention of James that the progress of the catholic party 
 in the three kingdoms should be uniformly progressive, 
 then the earl advanced far too rapidly. 
 
 Some weeks before the convocation of parliament, which 
 had been prorogued to the 9th of November, and amidst the 
 anxieties occasioned to the English protestants by the en- 
 croachments of the catholic party since the accession of 
 James, there arrived in the ports of England a multitude of 
 families who had fied from France, and came to ask an 
 asylum. The edict of Nantes had been revoked. The 
 refugees, on landing, gave lamentable accounts of the perse- 
 cution which they had just escaped from. The provinces 
 of the- south of France were at that moment the theatre 
 of horrors to which the land had been a stranger since the 
 close of the wars of religion. The peaceful country districts, 
 the industrious towns of Languedoc, Dauphiné, Provence, and 
 Beam, were devastated by the regular troops under the di- 
 rection of the priests and courtiers of the great' king. The 
 houses of the protestants were pillaged and burned; the ap- 
 proaches to the towns and the high roads were covered with 
 
204 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 the dead bodies of those who had perished by the hands of the 
 soldiers, and who, having died out of the catholic pale, were 
 denied burial. The convents, converted into prisons, were 
 filled with women and girls, whom bigotry exercised all its 
 ingenuity to torture ; in order to convert; hunger, whipping, 
 close imprisonment, wrested from them what the eloquence of 
 the" catholic preachers had not obtained. The refugees who 
 followed, added to the first accounts details more and more 
 frightfully odious, and all these wrongs and sufferings they 
 charged upon the Jesuits, directors of the conscience of 
 Louis XIV. These foreign protestants were received with 
 a mournful but eager welcome by men who remembered 
 the similar horrors to which persecutors of the same order 
 had recently given up the west of England. Nor were 
 they forbidden to testify their interest in these 'exiles, to 
 clothe them, to feed them, and make public collections for 
 them; for James, not yet sure of his means for the great 
 work he meditated, and which Louis XIV. had just ac- 
 complished 1 , had thought it advisable to express publicly a 
 reprobation of the revocation of the edict of Nantes as un- 
 Christian and impolitic. 
 
 Parliament opened, and James addressed it as follows: — 
 " After the storm that seemed to be coming upon us when Ave 
 parted last, I am glad to meet you all again in so great peace 
 and quietness; God Almighty be praised, by Wko£e blessing 
 that rebellion was suppressed. But when we reflect what an 
 inconsiderable number of men began it, and Iioav long they 
 carried it on without any opposition, I hope every body will 
 be convinced that the militia, which hath hitherto been so 
 muclr depended on, is not sufficient for such occasions; 'and 
 that there is nothing but a good force of well disciplined 
 troops in constant pay that can defend us from such as, either 
 at home or abroad, are disposed to disturb us; and, in truth, 
 my concern for the peace and quiet of my subjects, as well as 
 for the safety of the government, made me think it necessary 
 to increase the number to the proportion I have done: that I 
 owed as well to the honour as the security of the nation, 
 whose reputation was so infinitely 'exposed to all birr neigh- 
 bours, by having so evidently lain open to this late wretched 
 attempt, that it is not to be repaired without keeping such a 
 body of men on foot that none may ever have the thought of 
 
1686.] the king's speech. 205 
 
 finding us again so miserably unprovided. It is for the 
 support of this great charge, .which is more than double 
 to what it was, that I ask your assistance in giving me a 
 supply answerable to the expenses it brings along with it; 
 and I cannot doubt but what I have begun, so much for the 
 honour and defence of the government, will be continued by 
 you with all. the cheerfulness and readiness that is requisite 
 for a work of so great importance. Let no man take excep- 
 tion, that there are some officers in the army not qualified, 
 according to the late tests, for their employments : the gentle- 
 men, I must tell you, are most of them yvell kmowivto me, and 
 having formerly served with me on several occasions, and 
 having always approved the loyalty of their principles by 
 their practice. I think them now fit to be employed under 
 me; and I will deal plainly with you, .that . having had the 
 benefit of their service in such a time of need and danger, I 
 will neither expose them to disgrace, nor myself to the want 
 of them, if there should be another rebellion, to make them 
 necessary to me, . I am afraid some men maybe so wicked to 
 hope .and expect that a difference may happen between you 
 and me upon this occasion, but when you consider what 
 advantages Jiave arisen to us, in a few months, by the good 
 understanding we have hitherto had: what wonderful effects 
 it hath already produced in the change of the whole scene 
 of affairs abroad, so much more to the honour of the nation 
 and the figure it ought to make in the world, and that 
 noth-ing can. hinder a farther progress in this way, to .all our 
 satisfactions, but fears and jealousies amongst ourselves; I 
 would not apprehend that such a misfortune, can befal us as a 
 division, or but a coldness between us, nor that anything can 
 shake you in your steadiness and loyalty to me." 
 
 The nation and parliament had quite xurticipated . this- 
 speech; it was precisely en the two, points which he desired 
 to remove from all discussion, the utility of a standing army 
 and the dispensing with the tests, that protests were getting 
 up. The ,army now amounted to fourteen thousand men; 
 under the late reign it had never exceeded six or seven thou- 
 sand. iSothing had,, at first, been said about this increase, on 
 account of the. circumstance which served it for a pretext; 
 nor had they, in the crisis of danger, opposed commissions 
 being given to papists. But there were now no rebels, and 
 
206 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 the public protested against the troops, raised to combat them, 
 being kept on foot; and more especially, against their being 
 kept up with all their regularities which had crept into the 
 army under an organization so hastily framed. The two houses 
 for some days hesitated at passing from the submission which 
 they had hitherto displayed, to a resistance of which James 
 desired, as it were, to make them ashamed; but it was neces- 
 sary either to declare themselves decidedly, or to subside 
 into eternal silence, and the misery of the French protestants 
 spoke louder than all considerations of prudence. 
 
 The question came on first in the upper house, as to whether 
 the speech from the throne should be responded to by the 
 usual thanks. The duke of Devonshire said that they ought 
 to thank the king for having explained himself without evasion, 
 and for having told them what they were to expect from his 
 government. This daring speech compromised the house, if 
 it abstained from an address in reply; an address was there- 
 fore voted; but, a few days afterwards, the speech from the 
 throne was taken into consideration, article by article. The 
 partisans of the court insisted that this proceeding was unbe* 
 coming after an address which had sufficiently expressed the 
 opinion of the house. Their adversaries replied that they had 
 only consented to the address as to a simple form, and that 
 they were now about to show that they would not have the 
 laws infringed. The bishop of London declared that, in the 
 name of all the spiritual peers, he protested against the viola- 
 tion of the tests, without which he saw no liberty or guarantee 
 which could withstand the evil designs of the catholics. The 
 temporal lords, Mordaunt, Nottingham, and Halifax expressed 
 the same views, in more energetic terms. The chancellor 
 Jeffreys attempted to interrupt them by some of those inso- 
 lent apostrophes which were permitted elsewhere; but he was 
 taught to respect a place which his very presence contaminated, 
 and, not daring to express himself in invective, he could say 
 nothing at all. 
 
 In the house of commons the debate was more searching 
 and more animated. Middleton, the secretary of state, after 
 having commented at length on the king's speech, demanded, 
 not only that it should be gratefully responded to, but that 
 the house should immediately occupy itself with the subsidy 
 which the increase of the troops rendered necessary; he 
 
1686.] THE COMMONS PETITION THE KING. 207 
 
 seemed to hope that, with regard to the augmentation itself, 
 and the commissions given to catholic officers, the house 
 would yield to the opinion of the king, " a great soldier, as 
 well as a great king." Many members interrupted him with 
 exclamations of indignation and surprise. Others, till now 
 of opposite sentiments, exclaimed with equal energy against 
 the abolition of the tests ; calmer remonstrances followed: in 
 an imposing discussion, the illustrious voice of Seymour was 
 still heard; voices hitherto unknown were received with ap- 
 plause, speaking, for that first time, the language of liberty. 
 It was but too clear a foresight, said they, that heretofore 
 pointed out the dangers to which religion would be exposed, if 
 a popish king ascended the throne; a papist king had now 
 brought with him a papist army, which he was organizing to 
 oppress the people, whom meanwhile he sought to deceive by 
 fine words from the throne; that, in order to appreciate what 
 attempts were meditated, they need only compare the last 
 royal speech with that which had gained the confidence of 
 the first parliament and induced the house to vote an enormous 
 civil list, which still was not enough, and to condemn offences 
 similar to those which had before precipitated the throne into 
 the abyss of the revolution. Others said that it was an in- 
 sult to the feelings of the nation to declare its militia incapable 
 of defending the crown and the land; whereas it was to the 
 zeal of that militia that the prompt dispersion of the rebels 
 was due; that instead of disbanding the militia, it ought to 
 be extended; that they would rather pay double to men whom 
 they did not fear, than half to men whom they must always dread. 
 "When they came to the vote, it was evident that the en- 
 thusiasm of many members, however acceptable to the ma- 
 jority, had not destroyed in it the fatal idea, that it would be 
 a great misfortune too grievously to displease the king. Va- 
 rious compromises were proposed: that which had the majority 
 of votes was to grant the sums demanded by the king, but to 
 grant them to render the militia more efficient, and not for the 
 augmentation of the army, and to add to the bill a petition 
 that the king would no longer employ popish officers. Some 
 suggested an exception in favour of the popish officers who 
 had rendered signal services to the king; but the petition 
 passed without this addition, which would have altogether 
 neutralized it. It ran thus: — "Most gracious sovereign: we, 
 
208 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1685- 
 
 your majesty's most loyal and faithful subjects, the commons 
 in parliament assembled, do, in the first place, as in duty 
 bound, return your majesty our most humble and hearty 
 thanks for your great care and conduct in suppressing the 
 late rebellion, which threatened the overthrow of this govern- 
 ment, both in church and state, and the utter extirpation of 
 our religion as by law established, which is most dear unto us, 
 and which your majesty hath been pleased to give us. repeated 
 assurances you will always defend and support, which, with 
 all grateful hearts, we shall ever acknowledge. We further 
 crave leave to acquaint your majesty that we have, with all 
 duty and readiness, taken into our consideration your ma- 
 jesty's graqious speech to us: and as to that part. of it relating 
 to the officers in the army, not. qualified for theiremployments, 
 according to an act of parliament made in the 25th of the 
 reign of your majesty's brother, entitled;,. ' An Act for Pre- 
 venting Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants,' 
 we do, out of our bounden duty, represent unto your majesty, 
 that those officers cannot by law be capable of their employ- 
 ments, and that the incapacities they bring upon themselves 
 thereby, can only: be taken off by an act of parliament; 
 therefore, out of that great deference and duty we owe unto 
 your majesty, who have been graciously pleased to take notice 
 of their services to you, we are preparing a bill to pass both 
 houses for your royal assent, to indemnify them from the 
 penalties they have now incurred; and because the continuing 
 of them in their, employments may be taken, to be~a dispensing 
 with that law 'without act of . parliament j (the c^sequ^erice of 
 which is of the, greatest concern to the rights of all yCjVKtfàfr? 
 jesty's subjects, and to all the laws, made for the security of 
 their religion,) we therefore do , most humbly beseech your 
 majesty that you would be, graciously pleased to give such 
 directions therein .that no apprehensions or jealousies may 
 remain in the hearts of your majesty's good and faithful 
 subjects." 
 
 On receiving this address, James vehemently complained 
 of the house. The guarded forms of parliamentary language, 
 the assurances of devotion and respect, only served to aggra- 
 vate their audacity. Their thanks with regard to the Angli- 
 can religion, saved, they said, by the victory gained over the 
 rebels, looked like derision. Their promise of pardon to the 
 
1686.] COKE SENT TO THE TOWER. 209 
 
 popish officers who had accepted commissions was an insulting 
 defiance of the sovereign, who had been pleased to laud their 
 services, and who had declared his intention to continue to 
 them his confidence and his favour. Their request that he 
 would dismiss the popish officers as excluded by the Test Act, 
 a law, they said, which parliament alone could revoke, and 
 which it was determined to maintain as indispensable to the 
 tranquillity of the kingdom, was in point of fact a command. 
 James replied by a message, in which rage was tempered 
 with duplicity: "I did not expect such an address from the 
 house of commons, having so lately recommended to your 
 consideration the great advantages a good understanding be- 
 tween us had produced in a very short time, and given you 
 warning of fears and jealousies amongst ourselves; I had 
 reason to hope that the reputation God hath blessed^ me with 
 in the world, would have created and confirmed a greater 
 confidence in you of me, and of all that I say to you: but 
 however you proceed on your part, I will be steady in all my 
 promises I have made to you, and be very just to my word 
 in this and all my other speeches." 
 
 The house at this message manifested some uneasiness. 
 James had touched the sensitive chord of the majority in 
 referring to the consequences of a rupture. They had wished 
 him, instead of mixing up his last speech with those which 
 had been contradicted by him in so alarming a manner, to 
 have reverted' to his original promises; vague as they were, 
 they would- still have been satisfaction to some extent. A 
 member, named Coke, suddenly breaking the silence, ex- 
 claimed with warmth: M I hope we are Englishmen, and that 
 we are not afraid of hard words;" the partisans of the court 
 denounced this exclamation as an insult to the king. Those 
 who had voted the petition, fearing to seem desirous of more 
 even than they had asked for, deemed it expedient to require 
 an apology from Coke, and, on his refusal, sent him to the 
 Tower. It was enough, they thought, for the house to keep 
 to the defence of the tests. Every day saw members hitherto 
 considered as sold to power, rallying round that system of 
 opposition, which, under the late reign, had defeated the 
 papists. An observation like that of Coke's, had it been 
 otherwise received, would have checked them and thrown 
 them back into the fear of the excesses committed by the 
 
 p 
 
210 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER DEVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 exclusion parliament. The public mind, intent upon what 
 was passing in parliament, took courage on seeing such 
 unhoped-for conversions, and endeavoured to extend and 
 support them. The very petitions which at the meeting of 
 parliament had vainly complained of electioneering frauds and 
 violence, were now taken into consideration. The signers of 
 these petitions sent forth a public declaration that, notwith- 
 standing the irregularity of which they had at first thought 
 it their duty to complain, they acknowledged as good and 
 faithful members all those who had since given their votes for 
 the maintenance of the tests, and that they would re-elect 
 them in case of a dissolution. 
 
 The complaints of the petitioners were now therefore 
 directed only against those members who had voted against the 
 address, and the reigning faction was about to see the parlia- 
 ment and the nation once more reconciled, or rather, together 
 aroused from the long oblivion of their common duties. 
 
 James had decided upon dismissing parliament as soon as 
 he felt himself incapable of controlling it; but he had so fixed 
 his heart upon obtaining from it the abolition of the tests, 
 and he was so convinced that the nation would not murmur 
 at this, if the measure were sanctioned by parliament, that he 
 employed a tone of conciliation not at all belonging to his 
 character. He sent for all the leading members of the oppo- 
 sition, one by one, argued with them their objections, solicited 
 them and cajoled them, but in vain. Most of them flatly 
 refused him their votes, others required time : to reflect, and 
 all ultimately ridiculed this new plan of private lecturing on 
 the part of the king. James continued his petty intrigues 
 and his fruitless taking to task, but prorogued parliament 
 until the month of February in the following year. 
 
 One resource presented itself to him, that of procuring 
 from his faithful parliament of Scotland the suspension denied 
 him in England. ; In his opening address to that assembly, he 
 reminded the lords and burgesses of Scotland of the proofs of 
 devotion they had given him for the last six years, praised 
 their conduct in the last insurrection, spoke of his clemency 
 so largely experienced by the rebels: and passing from these, 
 by a somewhat forced connexion, to the catholics, he said: 
 " And whilst we show these acts of mercy to the enemies of 
 our person, crown, and royal dignity, we cannot be unmind- 
 
1687.] CONDUCT OF THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT. 211 
 
 ful of others, our innocent subjects, those of the Roman catho- 
 lic religion, who have, with the hazard of their lives and for- 
 tunes, been always assistant to the crown in the worst of 
 rebellions and usurpations, though they lay ;under discourage- 
 ments hardly to be named. Them we do heartily recom- 
 mend to your care, to the end that, as they have given good 
 experience of their true loyalty and peaceable behaviour, 
 so by your assistance they may have the protection of our 
 law, and that security under our government which others of 
 our subjects have, not suffering them to lie under obligations 
 which their religion cannot admit of. By doing whereof, you 
 will give a demonstration of the duty and affection you have 
 for us, and do us most acceptable service." 
 
 The earl of Murray, charged, in his capacity of high 
 commissioner, with delivering this speech to the Scottish 
 parliament, added some observations and comments, as usual; 
 but, whether from timidity, or from attachment to the An- 
 glican religion, said not a word about the catholics. Some 
 members, more zealous than he, proposed, in answer to the 
 king's speech, that the catholics should be permitted the 
 private exercise of their worship, but without for this purpose 
 abrogating the Anglican laws. Though this concession was 
 very far from what James had expected from the house, 
 a very warm opposition was raised; bishops, burgesses, tem- 
 poral lords, all protested against it; the very men who the 
 year before, under the alarm of Argyle's insurrection, had, in 
 the preparation of several acts against the doctrine of resist- 
 ance, exhausted all the forms of adulation, all the protesta- 
 tions of passive obedience. James could not in the least 
 comprehend so sudden a change; he politically attributed it 
 to want of address on the part of lord Murray, but deemed 
 it, meanwhile, un advisable to retain the Scottish parliament 
 any longer. It was useless to think of convoking one in 
 Ireland; the protestant nobility and burgesses there, who 
 possessed the whole wealth of the country, were then 
 engaged in a struggle against the earl of Tyrconnel. 
 
 But the abolition of the tests was a thing resolved upon in 
 the catholic council, and for this a sanction of some kind or 
 other was required, as they dared not yet proceed upon the 
 royal will alone. Chance, or the machinations of the catholics, 
 created an affair which brought the question of the tests 
 
 p2 
 
212 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 under another form before the court of king's bench. This 
 court had not the power to abolish the Test Act, but it might 
 consider whether the king had the right of exempting parti- 
 cular subjects from the formalities. The coachman of sir 
 Edward Hales, a gentleman of Kent, denounced his master 
 for not having taken the tests, though he held an office under 
 government, and claimed the reward of 500^., which the law 
 assigned to the informer^ Hales was brought to trial; it 
 was no longer Jeffreys, but a gentler magistrate, the brother 
 of admiral Herbert, who now filled the office of lord chief 
 justice. The king did not leave to him the choice of the 
 judges who were to decide upon the claim of Hales' coach- 
 man; he closeted himself with the judges one by one, dis- 
 missed some, and got those w ho replaced them, " ignorant 
 men," says an historian, " and scandalously incompetent," to 
 acknowledge his dispensing power. The arguments em- 
 ployed by James in these private conferences were doubtless 
 those which We find developed at length in his Memoirs; for 
 instance, " there is no law whatsoever but may be dispensed 
 with by the supreme lawgiver, as the laws of God may be 
 dispensed with by God himself, as it appears by God's com- 
 mand to Abraham to offer up his son Isaac."' 
 
 The judges of the king's bench, after a trial;, the procrasti- 
 nation of which gave time for all sorts of manœuvres to 
 obtain success, pronounced a despicable judgment; but, at 
 least, by assigning no grounds for it, avoided a repetition of 
 the pitiful argumenté of James. They declared, almost in 
 the very language used by the crown counsel:— 1. That the 
 kings of England are sovereign princes; 2. That thé laws of 
 England are the ' king's laws ; S. That therefore it is an in- 
 separable prerogative in the kings of England to dispensé 
 with penal laws in particular cases, and upon particular 
 necessary ^reasons; 4. That of those reasons, and those neces- 
 sities, the king himself is sole judge; and finally, which is 
 consequent upon ail, 5. That this is not a trust invested in, 
 or granted to the king by the people, but the ancienï remains 
 of the sovereign power and prerogative of the* kings of Eng- 
 land, which neveivyet was taken from them, nor can be. 
 
 The case thus' decided the king thought he'nhiglft rely 
 upon the respect always felt by the English people for the 
 decisions of the higher courts, to exempt all his" catholic 
 
1687.] PROGRESS OF PROSELYTISE. 213 
 
 subjects from the obligations of the test. And upon this, it 
 became no longer a question merely of preserving in their 
 commissions and offices those whose dismissal had been de- 
 manded by parliament. This first success raised the preten- 
 sions of , the catholic party, and the exception expunged was 
 set down as a general rule. To obtain or to retain certain 
 employments, it was necessary to be of the same religion with 
 the king. Papists replaced in the army and in the administra- 
 tion all 7 those who had pronounced at all energetically for the 
 maintenance of the tests. Abjurations, somewhat out of 
 credit during the last session of parliament, again resumed 
 favour. .The mysteries of Catholicism became the common 
 topic of conversation at court, and in the upper circles of 
 society. While throughout the kingdom , collections were 
 being made, for the victims of the revocation of the edict of 
 Nantes, Versailles was copied at Whitehall. Lay converters 
 went about making proselytes amidst fêtes and frivolous 
 amusements; '. Those who had favours to obtain were eager to 
 listen and to seem to profit; men, notorious for the irregu- 
 larity of their lives, affected to be struck with sudden illu- 
 mination; others, to the na vast scandal, of the true believers, 
 listened for awhile to the exhortations; of the priests, and then 
 suddenly disconcerted them by some profane sarcasm. 
 
 The famous colonel Kirke, closely pressed to become a 
 papist, answered that he was pre-engaged, having promised 
 the emperor of .Morocco, if he ever did change his religion, 
 that toxw.fcuid turn Màhommedân. The earl of Mulgrave 
 answered with much more wit the Jesuits- who were main- 
 taining the dogma of the real presence: " that, after a great 
 deal of -pains,; he had got himself to admit the existence of a 
 God, creator of man; but that he should require very sub- 
 stantial evidence before he could believe 3 that man, quits 
 with his author, could create God in his turn." The earl of 
 Middleton had been long importuned by a missionary. The 
 latter commenced the conversation one day with this ques- 
 tion: " You believe in the Trinity, do you not?" " Softly," 
 answered the earl; " who told you so? The business in hand 
 is your belief, and the proofs you have to give me for it; and 
 not at all mine." The missionary withdrew in confusion. 
 James had himself undertaken the conversion of Rochester, 
 the lord treasurer. He attended a conference which the latter 
 
214 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 consented to have with some catholic priests. The priests 
 having talked a long time about transubstantiation, Rochester 
 contemptuously shrugged his shoulders: "And this is all 
 you've got to say to make a man change his religion?" And 
 so the conference ended. 
 
 These daring sallies, sanctioned in the high lords, were 
 repeated in public, which looked upon them as some satisfac- 
 tion for the insolence w T ith which the Jesuits and monks of 
 every denomination presented themselves everywhere. They 
 built chapels and convents in the most populous quarters of 
 London; Franciscans, Carmelites, Benedictines, walked the 
 streets in the habits of their order; their cloisters arose at the 
 very gates of the palace of Saint James: they preached in 
 public, few people followed them, but crowds went to the 
 Anglican churches. It w r as here that the public discontent 
 found materials for its expression. The protestant ministers 
 took one by one all the arguments which they had heard sup- 
 ported in the catholic chapels; they attacked alike the prin- 
 ciples of the foreign theologians, and the composition of their 
 sermons — a medley of English, Italian, and French; they ex- 
 cited against them at once hatred and ridicule; they rekindled 
 the religious zeal of the congregations by fervently imploring 
 the divine protection, and by showing persecution about to 
 fall down upon the English church, as upon the protestant 
 church in France. The sermons of some of the more cele- 
 brated, after having moved numerous audiences, were repro- 
 duced by the press, and read and re-read in people's houses. 
 
 One day, doctor Sharp, rector of Saint Giles's, and one of 
 the most popular preachers, received, as he descended from 
 the pulpit, a note, without signature, containing a sort of 
 challenge upon one of the controversial questions which 
 then occupied men's minds; he re-ascended the pulpit, read 
 over the anonymous propositions, and immediately extem- 
 porized a reply, which was afterwards printed. As, in 
 his fervour, he had not spared apostates from the Angli- 
 can church, the principal passages of his discourse were de- 
 clared to be seditious. Converted hypocrites and catholic 
 preachers, furious at being unable to struggle successfully 
 against adversaries more eloquent and more listened to than 
 themselves, had long desired a pretext for fettering the liberty 
 of controversy; they pretended that some of the reflections 
 
1687.] TRIAL OF THE BISHOP OF LONDON. 215 
 
 of Sharp referred to his majesty and his government, 
 whereupon James directed the bishop of London to suspend 
 the doctor. The bishop felt it his duty to refuse to pronounce 
 such a suspension without the previous decision to that effect 
 of an ecclesiastical court. The unexpected resistance of the 
 bishop gave a very serious character to the affair of Sharp, 
 and caused the court much embarrassment: at length, it con- 
 ceived that this was an opportunity for carrying out an idea 
 of lord chancellor Jeffreys. Since he had quitted the office 
 of lord chief justice, he had found himself, much to his 
 annoyance, less useful, and in order to bring himself forward 
 once more, he had advised the re-establishment of the old 
 ecclesiastical tribunal, the court of high commission, which 
 was abolished by the parliament of 1640. This tribunal, of 
 which he proposed to be president, was to be called the Court 
 of Delegates; it was to consist of at least three members, 
 bishops, or temporal lords, at the will of the king; it was to 
 inquire into all abuses punishable by the censure of the 
 church; to summon before it ecclesiastics, of what rank 
 soever, charged with offences committed in the exercise of 
 their functions, and to judge them without appeal. It suited 
 the king to transfer to a tribunal of this kind the high eccle- 
 siastical jurisdiction attached to his supremacy, and the 
 exercise of which appeared to him incompatible with the 
 duties of a different religion, and the papists would find their 
 account in an institution which rendered such a man as 
 Jeffreys supreme arbiter of controversies in which they felt 
 themselves defeated. The court of delegates was accordingly 
 established, and the bishop of London immediately cited 
 before it. 
 
 Jeffreys presided; the earl of Rochester, the bishops of 
 Durham and Rochester, and the earl of Sunderland were the 
 judges present. Being asked why, after the express order 
 of the king, he had not suspended doctor Sharp, accused of 
 seditious preaching, the bishop answered, that he had followed 
 the advice of persons well versed in civil and canonical laws; 
 that if he had transgressed the law, it was not from any wilful 
 fault on his part, but from ignorance and inadvertency. 
 " Ignorantia juris non excusât" cried Jeffreys; "you ought 
 to have known the law, and it was a wonder you did not." 
 The bishop protested that not only did he not know the law 
 
216 HISTOHY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 which they seemed disposed to apply to him, but that he did 
 not know the commission in virtue of which the court pro- 
 ceeded against him. " It would appear, my lord,' r said Jeffreys, 
 sneeringly, "that you design to quarrel with the jurisdiction 
 and legality of this court. No copy of the commission can he 
 granted, and it is unreasonable to desire it; it is upon record, 
 all the coffee-houses have it for a penny a piece, and I doubt 
 not but your lordship has seen it. Might every one that 
 appears here challenge the sight of our commission, all our 
 time would be taken in the reading, and we have something 
 else to do.- The proceedings of courts in this kind are never 
 by libel and articles: Sapientem succinctim ore terms, byword 
 of mouth only; and it is a short question I ask: Why did you 
 not obey the king ?" The bishop said it was indeed a short 
 question, but it required more words to answer it, and a 
 certain time to prepare that answer. Then, addressing him- 
 self directly to Jeffreys, he added, with dignity: " I pray your 
 lordships to consider I am a peer, a bishop, and have a public 
 trust, though unworthy, under a public character; and I 
 would behave myself as becomes one in these capacities." 
 
 Jeffreys stammered out a few words in apology, and after a 
 short deliberation with the other judges, announced to the 
 bishop that the court granted him a week to prepare his 
 defence. 1 9fft \ irg'njdnilj 3( oi ^loilduq b 
 
 In the second sittkigy Jeffreys exhibited thë^afeë 'brutality 
 ai beforfe;lu^«r'bisà^^ time,' said, that he- 
 
 had not boeîilàlg^ to prepare his defence, and that up to that 
 day he-had alfto&ethei? in 1 vain had search made- in thefebSgy- 
 houses of London for ; the commission which the chancellor 
 had told him he might fed there. Jeffreys, thus recalled to 
 this imperjfcinencë 1 of the first sitting, made a pretence of 
 explaining^. He told the bishop that in informing him the 
 commission might be found for a penny in 'the taverns, he 
 did not-meantoeokvey^fhat a person of his-chàtotëi^ebuld 
 ii-equent'such; plâcfel. The bishop obtained a further delay 
 of a fortnight. On his third appearance, as at his first, he 
 denied the competency ef the court; but Jeffreys 'showed so 
 little mofeï^ï^nHo ^l^nfei^4>ï^eë(Mwg I ^tb < ^^îhu^WÀ^èlS 
 that-it éaè<h(&m§tvf>4h gbnî&W : $hë real matter éf the case. 
 Four connsi^p^^ sought to prove 
 
 that the bishop had obeved the king consti'tuhôn# J ii¥ û\é- 
 
1687.] DISMISSAL OF CLARENDON. 217 
 
 obeying the king personal; a distinction which the court was 
 not disposed to admit, for it was by this same distinction that 
 the presbyterians had heretofore been led from resistance to 
 insurrection. The bishop, by decree of the court of dele- 
 gates, was suspended from his functions. The trial had been 
 watched with eager interest, not that there was any fear for 
 the life or liberty of the prelate, but because in his person the 
 cause of the Anglican church was being judged. The punish- 
 ment, though not a severe one, alarmed the preachers, but 
 still, while the suspension lasted, the clergy of London and 
 the zealous members of the church of England exhibited a 
 deference and submission to the bishop, as bishop, far greater 
 than before. His recommendations were better obeyed than 
 any orders he could have given, in tM regXilat>fexjérci^eIofihis 
 functions. ; ;: ;:uni beiiupvi ii tad ,nob-.. 
 
 The trial of the bishop .ofr^pp^it^^i^lfc© Mnthah close 
 of the year 1636. r At that period, the preponderance of the 
 catholic party in the ministry in the privy counci], in the ad- 
 ministration, and in the higher ranks of the army, was no 
 longer . contested. The exempfion.from the Test had, in a 
 few weeks, done for -this party what its e^tablishmepitvfjunder 
 the Cabal, had. done for the protestant: 'opposition-. ; < Scotland 
 was governed by papist loiTlsjj.BomaiiKîatholic j priests had 
 dared publicly to celebrate mass in Edinburgh ; the people had 
 risen to de^Dy^.^ of 
 
 the leaders of the outbreak, and; 30aln>pvM'le-eëiàblished, In 
 Ireland,, jfcn# s #$ii]l,$f ^yrconnel waê-eo^pletipgfith#3i^bçganiza- 
 J:ion, pf.fte mmlMi^Mm^ [M$ mgçt&i tj&fci&afe Mould! sowl 
 'îSÎKWfti iRP 1 ^?! J- ^J^ÎîiîwîsiSfcisolàiM^o iniitth^jtrajiafo^ihat all the 
 ^p^r^.^rejp^jtholiesj: that it w^ltàSe?rtori?esMreiîèôir ^poli- 
 tical rights, to the.^isl^^r^hoxpro^sed tb^sdSgiap^f the 
 fâïSÂr^siïï^iSWft ^o^tftO|init^d^^ [ttomlîntQ^itQï [munici- 
 pal corpo^t^n^j^r^jr^iîv^r^h^içb^tei?^ Qfrgtamsatf&foodies ; 
 that th§)9jQ}j f jqb^i^c|^ to. the exe^u^e^^fc^hfc ud^hms we was 
 the pr^ptc^ of the earl of Claren(lpj&. \H^f^ppto^thef^artof 
 Clarendon, was -recalled. uaqqa biidi -id nO Jilgint'iO' 
 
 Thus thingfftrap^Jy ^fi^e^flçd'i^ivp^yj^^tîito^îxio*. 
 Arbitrary f g^f^8ra 
 
 dated tl^t^rptm^^Vii^iipn^tonclï: fà^mm'hitâi delegate s 
 shack^j Aî^i#PW§s^i tke^p^ion. of | the Anglican clergy. 
 The wjiqj&éekaœe.iaow. rested upon. the army; it had hitherto 
 
218 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION, [1686- 
 
 been obedient ; but the caresses lavished upon it fully showed 
 it the importance attached to it; the principles of loyalty and 
 absolute devotion which it had been sought to inculcate upon 
 it, reminded it of other principles, of which nothing was said. 
 James aimed to display in the eyes of the soldiers the qualities 
 of a chivalrous king. His interests according with his military 
 mania, had given him the idea of forming at Hounslow Heath 
 a camp of eight or ten thousand men. He frequently visited it, 
 and occupied himself with puerile ostentation in the most 
 petty details of clothing, training, and discipline of the troops; 
 their pay was regularly given them, and increased by special 
 bounties. The court party had reckoned on the effect which 
 such a display of devoted troops would produce in the public 
 mind; but it happened on the contrary, that the soldiers of 
 the various regiments thus assembled interchanged their feel- 
 ings of discontent and of hatred towards the popish officers 
 who commanded them, and the chaplains whom they inces- 
 santly saw by the side of the king. The existence of the 
 camp was soon less beneficial to the views of the court than 
 favourable to certain experiments upon the troops by the other 
 party. 
 
 In the camp at Hounslow, the object of his solicitude, James 
 had the vexation of witnessing the success of a pamphlet ad- 
 dressed to the. soldiers, and profusely circulated among them. 
 It was entitled, Remonstrance to the Army> and was by Mr. 
 Samuel Johnson, author of the book, entitled Julian* the 
 Apostate^ which had been condemned by the university of 
 Oxford at the time of the royalist reaction. Johnson, in 
 appealing to the soldiers, instead of losing himself in the 
 futilities of a controversy which the papists no longer kept up 
 except by decrees of the court of delegates, had acted with 
 equal sense and courage. In reminding the soldiers that they 
 belonged to the nation by the ties of blood and the obligations 
 of citizens, before they belonged to power by their profession, 
 he had excited in them sentiments which, despite all seduc- 
 tions, are never completely extinct under the cuirass, and 
 produce a powerful and angry action, when a difficult position 
 explains to them, at length, the enigma of passive obedience. 
 
 The agitation produced in the camp by the Remonstrance 
 was quite manifest; the work, however, had been drawn up 
 with all the discretion which its very daring required; and 
 
1687.] PROSPECT OF THE ACCESSION OF WILLIAM. 219 
 
 accordingly, slight hold upon the doctor presenting itself 
 in the form of his production, they punished its intention; 
 the more criminal they found this, the better did they prove 
 that he had hit the vulnerable point. The court of delegates 
 condemned him to the pillory, and to whipping, the punish- 
 ment of the vilest malefactors. 
 
 From the camp at Hounslow, Johnson's pamphlet, ren- 
 dered still more popular than ever by the prosecution of 
 its author, made its way to the fleet, and was received 
 by the sailors as it had been by the soldiers. Their feelings 
 were evidently those of the nation at large. They did 
 not burst forth in plots, ever the sure indications of the 
 weakness of parties. A lofty hope sustained men's minds, 
 and rendered them strong and merely patient, when perhaps 
 power deemed them most docile. James was in his fiftieth 
 year; a somewhat irregular life had exposed him at an early 
 age to complaints still encouraged by secret debaucheries, of 
 which the queen, his second wife, was, it was said, the 
 victim; the queen, already four times deceived in the hope of 
 giving an heir to the crown, was, although still young, very 
 sickly, and had now been sterile for seven years: thus the 
 princess Mary, wife of the prince of Orange, would be called, 
 by her rights, to repair the evils of the protestant religion; 
 the people relied on her attachment to that religion, and upon 
 the wisdom of the stadtholder, for the re-establishment of the 
 national liberties, and were decided upon waiting for the 
 natural course of things to bring about this remedy; expe- 
 rience teaching them to prefer this to the extreme measures 
 which were rather calculated to perpetuate the evil than to 
 destroy it. 
 
 But this prospect of the accession of William, in right of 
 the princess his wife, was not overlooked by the reigning party 
 in England. That which put the nation in heart, disturbed 
 this party amidst the intoxication of its triumphs: the less its 
 encroachments were resisted, the more was it compelled to 
 the belief that the weakness was a thing of calculation; that 
 people spontaneously yielded ground in order to achieve the 
 legitimate and invincible obstacle which w^ould arise from the 
 right and will of the prince of Orange. Each day brought 
 this end nearer; what would become of the catholic religion 
 after the death of the king? The prospect did not inspire 
 
220 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 them all with the same ideas; some it struck with irresolution* 
 others it armed with an energy capable of daring everything. 
 There were consequently two catholic parties; the one, the 
 moderate catholic party, to which belonged most of those who 
 became converts from interested motives, and the less zealous 
 catholics, who simply wished their religion to be tolerated; 
 the other, the high catholic party, at the head of which were 
 the Jesuits. It w^as for these that the earl of Tyrconnel was 
 labouring in Ireland. The monks of every order w T ho were 
 seeking to create property for themselves in the country; who 
 were building convents there, and opening chapels and 
 schools, and the men so compromised by their acts of violence 
 as to have reason to fear any re-action, however moderate,— 
 all such were high catholics. Barillon, the French ambassador, 
 and a few priests, secret agents of the court of Eome, in- 
 clined to, the moderate party. 
 
 James hesitated. Pie washed that, during his life, his re- 
 ligion might be so firmly established in England as to have 
 nothing to. fear after his departure; yet still he -felt some 
 scruples at assailing the right of his daughters, the princess 
 Mary, and the princess Anne, wife of prince George of 
 Denmark. The latter was then -with him; with the eldest he 
 corresponded in the most affectionate manner; he endeavoured 
 to induce her as well as her husband to approve of his inter- 
 pretations of the constitution, and his. claim to the dispensing 
 power. He hoped thus to conciliate both the low and the 
 high catholics. The former represented to him that he ought 
 to give up the idea of establishing the catholic religion in the 
 kingdom in his lifetime; that it was enough for his glory 
 to have begun the work, that he compromised it by seeking 
 to urge it forward by violent means; that with gentleness he 
 might effect its continuing its work by persuasion, under suc- 
 cessors of a different religion; that it was thus he should view 
 the interests of Heaven, interests enduring and not those of a 
 day, like the life of men and of kings. But the high catholics 
 besought him to remember that the catholic religion had 
 already been established once; that queen Mary's hesitation 
 had been the dupe of the feigned submission of that Elizabeth 
 whom the protestants hoped to see revived in the princess of 
 Orange; that to lose, by scruples such as those which had 
 restrained queen Mary, the opportunity of for ever extirpating 
 
1687.] TRIUMPH OF THE HIGH CATHOLICS. 221 
 
 the protestant heresy from the kingdom, would be a weakness 
 unworthy of a king, born to be obeyed, and hitherto so mira- 
 culously protected by Heaven in all that he had undertaken 
 in favour of religion; they added, that history gave ample 
 evidence how little the last wishes of kings were respected; 
 that the revolutionists, under the late king, by doing their 
 utmost to exclude his present majesty from the succession, had 
 shown how they viewed the question between the two religions ; 
 that he ought to follow their example; that safety alone con- 
 sisted in the conversion or exclusion of the protestant heirs. 
 It was inevitable that the high party should triumph and 
 carry the king with them, because a counter-revolution will 
 sot stop of it self any more than a. r evol ut ion . The moderate 
 catholics were here what the presbyterians had been in the 
 political revolution ; they sought the end without the means ; 
 they indulged the preposterous hope of obtaining favour and 
 protection for their religion under a protestant king, as the 
 presbyterkns had yielded to that of perpetuating republican 
 institutions under royalty. In one of those situations where 
 parties, must obtain guarantees by their audacity alone, the 
 independents had convinced the nation of the powerlessness 
 of the presbyterians; in a similar situation, the last of the 
 counter-revolutionists compelled James to acknowledge that 
 they. alone could suit his views. They drew him with them, 
 and from: that time he no longer belonged either to the 
 moderate oafthoMès or to himself. *"?» r !^ 01 ™ r "™ 
 
 fcloixo od tfidi mid ot bsiaeaeiq^ WfrJui 9liT i .Bododte^dgid 
 sl(i ni iiorgifei ïdodteo &di -gaidzM&as to mbi edi qi 
 Y'lolo gid ioî douons bby? Si ted* jarabalil aid ai mot 
 sobtese \d ii bsaimoiqaioo sd tedi ,iiow silt airgad 
 
 dïtvr unh ;eaB9m hmJoW ^d b-mwidl tr 01 
 
 -pua isbau ^oiafiireiaq vd iiow eii gohmitaoo art loafto : 
 
 sdi 8bw n toit jaorgilen tarc»rb c io e* 
 
 mibna btesioiai t aeY&eïï h 
 
 ; sdj JuS .a^abl 'to bflB nsm lo eiil sdi oAil 
 
 idlfio odf tadt I9dm9ffl6'i ot mid frdgi 
 
 nohfi c^ M ir,w; i' ri5,h ; )oao ' 
 
 I tfidj lo noiggimdijg ! 
 
 iqod -Tr. 
 
 bull 
 
222 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ABSOLUTE POWER. 
 
 The Jesuits at the head of the counter-revolution — First project for excluding 
 the prince of Orange from the succession — System of religious tolera- 
 tion—Brief alliance, under this system, of the nonconforming protestants 
 and the catholics — Embassy of d'Albe ville and of Dykvelt— Success of 
 Dykvelt in England — Fruitless efforts of d'Albeville to deceive the prince 
 of Orange- — Absolute power proclaimed by ordinance in England and Scot- 
 land — Resistance of the church of England men ; the catholics abandoned 
 by the nonconformists— Second plan of the Jesuits with regard to the 
 succession — Visit of the king and queen to Bath — Pretended pregnancy 
 of the queen — Invasion of the universities by the Jesuits— Useless efforts 
 to form an absolutist parliament — Second ordinance proclaiming absolute 
 power — The bishops refuse to read the ordinance — Trial of the bishops 
 — Pretended birth of a prince of Wales — General demonstration of the 
 people and the regular troops against the government of the Jesuits — 
 The protestant aristocracy prevent a new revolution by calling in the 
 prince of Orange. 
 
 When the catholics had made sufficient progress for it to 
 become a question which religion should predominate, theirs or 
 that of the church of England, the division which manifested 
 itself among them was, not a rupture, but the disagreement 
 which never fails to arise in parties upon the approach of great 
 obstacles, between those who mistake and those who judge 
 calmly, those who dare everything and those who hesitate. 
 Up to the time when resistance had been resumed by the 
 church of England and the parliament, lords Bellasis, Arundel, 
 and Powis, formerly involved in the popish plot, the English 
 Jesuit Petre, omnipotent over the mind of the king, whom he 
 had supported through his protracted disappointments, the 
 
1687.] DESIGNS OF THE HIGH CATHOLICS. 223 
 
 earl of Tyrconnel, commander of the troops in Ireland, the 
 earls of Perth and Murray, charged with the government of 
 Scotland, had been considered as the chiefs of the catholic 
 party. Public opinion had also mixed up with them, or at 
 least regarded as favourable to the catholic interests, the am- 
 bassadors of France and Spain, an Italian priest named d'Adda, 
 secretly received at court in quality of papal nuncio, a Capucin, 
 James's confessor, the minister Sunderland, the chancellor 
 Jeffreys, and all the members of the ecclesiastical commission. 
 But within a few months, lords Powis, Arundel, and Bellasis, 
 almost as soon as they had taken their seats in the privy 
 council, lost their credit at court ; the French ambassador, the 
 Spanish ambassador, the papal nuncio, united with those 
 noblemen to oppose an influence which they began to consider 
 dangerous; Jeffreys himself, by some hesitation in his con- 
 duct, showed that he felt himself outstripped. All the affairs 
 of state were concentred in the minister Sunderland, father 
 Petre, the queen and the king; in Ireland, after the recal of 
 Clarendon, the earl of Tyrconnel united in himself the civil 
 government with the command of the troops; the earls of 
 Perth and Murray retained their power in Scotland. The 
 moderate catholics were entirely apart from the high catholics, 
 and the latter had notoriously prevailed. Almost all of them 
 were practised intriguers, formed amidst and prepared for, 
 political and religious usurpations. Knowing from experience 
 that the oppressed part has no mercy when it gets the 
 mastery, they proposed to seek their safety by transmitting 
 the crown to papist successors. 
 
 From this moment, then, the counter-revolution was no 
 longer merely a conspiracy against the liberties and the 
 religion of England, but against the right of the prince of 
 Orange to the crown. As it was obvious to all that the 
 exclusion of the prince was the last resource of the high 
 catholics, as soon as they had possession of the helm of state, 
 the anxiety natural under such circumstances, and the usual 
 babbling of the court, gave birth to numerous projects with 
 which the ruling faction had nothing to do. The French 
 ambassador, in announcing to Louis XI Y., much better in- 
 formed on the subject than himself from the correspondence 
 of father Lachaise, the ascendancy irrevocably gained by the 
 high catholics, touched upon the reports already in circulation 
 
224 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 witli reference to the succession. " Men do not despair," 
 said he, " of finding means, by and by, to make the crown pass 
 to a popish king. For this purpose many things must be 
 accomplished which are now but just begun." 
 
 The projects suspected by Barillon were then, as to their 
 means, known to but a very small number of persons. There 
 -was at first a bold and very complicated plan: it consisted in 
 legally -excluding the prince of Orange, by invoking the pre- 
 cedent created by the whigs against the duke of York. No 
 historian appears to have thoroughly fathomed this project; 
 we do not find it developed in any of the correspondence be- 
 tween Louis XIV. and his ambassadors in Holland and 
 England; doubtless they were unacquainted with its details, 
 some of which would naturally have been kept from their 
 knowledge. Nor does James confess it in his Memoirs; but 
 we can trace it out in a system of acts, which, considered 
 singly, would seem to belong to wholly divergent views. 
 
 The catholics recalled to mind that the parliament, before 
 the affair of Oxford, had been upon the point of obtaining 
 from Charles II. his assent to a bill excluding the duke of 
 York as a papist, and nominating the prince of Orange in his 
 place. They did not doubt but that the nation would have 
 accepted this substitution as legitimate; and they thought it 
 would be possible to succeed where the whigs had failed from 
 want of the royal sanction; that to effect this, it would be 
 simply necessary to obtain a parliamentary majority as hostile 
 to the church of England as that of the whig parliaments had 
 been to popery. Now, in the later parliaments it was not the 
 members of the church of England, but the republicans and 
 the nonconformists, persecuted since the affair of Oxford, who 
 had composed or led the majority, and so powerfully agitated 
 public opinion. They had, indeed, ruined themselves by 
 menacing the established church, after having prostrated 
 popery; but this defeat was explained by the reconciliation 
 which had then been effected between royalty and the English 
 church. If the high catholics could now unite with these, 
 and excite them to resume their old attacks upon the Anglican 
 church; if, for the future, they were guaranteed the free 
 exercise of their worship, on condition that the same liberty 
 was granted by them to the catholics; might they not raise 
 against the English church, Scotland, w r holly presbyterian, 
 
1687. J PROJECTS OF THE HIGH CATHOLICS. 225 
 
 Ireland, almost wholly catholic, and in England a rich and 
 considerable portion of the population, the same which had 
 crushed episcopacy at the commencement of the révolu* 
 tion, and who, under the late reign, had suffered so deeply 
 from the persecution of the Anglican tests. Having thus 
 persuaded so great a variety of interests to demand the sup- 
 pression of tests and the free exercise of worship^ would it 
 not be easy to induce the majority of the parliament, not as 
 yet dissolved, but only prorogued since its refusal to acknow- 
 ledge a dispensing power in the king, would it not be easy to 
 make it take a different view of what it had done on the 
 question of the abolition of tests? And if it refused to hear 
 the voice of a new public opinion, would it not be easy, by 
 introducing, by means of new charters, the catholics and the 
 nonconformists into the corporations, to procure a house of 
 commons composed of partisans of the free exercise of 
 worship? The high catholics regarded all this as quite 
 practicable; they took no heed to the transformations under- 
 gone by the elements of which they proposed to make use; 
 they already saw themselves masters of a parliament adapted 
 to their views, and resolved to make it vote the exclusion of the 
 prince of Orange as hostile to the free exercise of religious 
 worship, by which means the succession would devplve upon 
 the second daughter of the king, who would become a con- 
 vert to the catholic religion, or upon the young duke de Fitz- 
 James, natural son of the king, or else upon the head of an 
 heir ivhom God would raise up, according to the hope already 
 expressed by the more daring. 
 
 Upon this plan, the high catholics undertook at once the 
 conversion of the princess of Denmark, whose ambition gave 
 some foundation for the hopes placed in her, the reconciliation 
 of the catholics and the nonconforming protestants, the re- 
 composition of the corporations, according to their principles, 
 and lastly, the public and private demonstration of the ad- 
 vantages which would result from the free exercise of religious 
 worship. It was a strange spectacle to see that court, lately 
 rejoicing at the sanguinary exploits of Jeffreys, all at once 
 preaching up the philosophical dogma of religious toleration, 
 and declaring w^ar against the church of England as the 
 eternal enemy of that toleration. They drew from the archives 
 the reports of the proceedings, which recalled the odious 
 
226 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 Anglican persecutions under the ministry of Clarendon, and 
 in the last reaction. They endeavoured to prove to the 
 protestant nonconformists that the catholics were their natural 
 allies, and the members of the church of England their 
 common enemies. The nonconformists now only formed 
 one body; common misfortunes of long duration had recon- 
 ciled, but had also greatly reduced in number what remained 
 of the old revolutionary sects, of the presbyterians, the 
 quakers, the anabaptists, and the independents. Overtures 
 were made to the heads of these different sects, to see whether 
 they would support, in the corporations or in parliament, a 
 law which should put an end to all religious quarrels by 
 abolishing the penal laws against dissent, and by suppressing 
 the tests which closed the career of office to the nonconfor- 
 mists. This new law, they said, should be perpetual, irre- 
 vocable, and published with all the solemnities which had 
 formerly accompanied the promulgation of the great charter. 
 Some nonconformists allowed themselves to be persuaded, 
 and among them Penn the quaker, who became the most 
 fervent as well as the most sincere apostle of the new 
 doctrine. Many, seduced less by the proposition itself, than 
 by the idea of, in their turn, making use of royalty against 
 their enemies the episcopalians, also began to declaim against 
 the tests. The king, in all his excursions to the various royal 
 residences, and while he was in London, sent for the more 
 wealthy persons about, and the members of parliament, and 
 closeted himself with them separately, in order to obtain 
 their consent to the suppression of the tests. Toleration 
 had become the favourite topic of his conversation. He 
 reverted to it on all occasions, warmly condemned the re- 
 vocation of the edict of Nantes, and showed himself eager 
 to receive the French fugitives. The courtiers and the 
 popish preachers had now no other theme, and gave enthusi- 
 astic pictures of the immense benefits which would result 
 from universal toleration. They expressed themselves with 
 such an appearance of conviction, or rather, there were such 
 sad and speaking truths to be said upon this noble and ex- 
 pansive topic, in a country where, for two centuries past, 
 men had been butchering their fellow men in order to establish 
 religious uniformity, that at first people could not help giving 
 attention to their discourses. Nowhere had sects been more 
 
1687.] CONCILIATION OF THE DISSENTERS. 227 
 
 numerous, more mutually hostile, more deeply rooted in their 
 own convictions; and yet, from the force of circumstances, 
 these interests had become so intersected, so mingled, com- 
 bined in so many various ways, that the new combination, 
 frankly proposed by any other men than James and the 
 high catholics, would not, perhaps, have been impracticable. 
 But how was it possible to put faith in the toleration of a 
 king whose nickname of Cameronian hangman and Cargillite 
 hangman, still attached to him, or in the good intentions of 
 those Jesuits against whom so many terrible accusations were 
 still fresh in mens' minds? The nonconforming protestants 
 frequently deliberated in their assemblies upon the proposi- 
 tions of the court, and ever hesitated to accept them as a 
 body. The members of parliament closeted with the king 
 gave only evasive answers. At the end of a few months, the 
 high catholics saw that they should obtain nothing from par- 
 liament, and urged James to take the initiative in the great 
 question of the abolition of the tests. He persuaded himself, 
 as he tells us in his Memoirs, that, in virtue of the absolute 
 power recognised in him by the judges of the king's bench, in 
 the affair of sir Edward Hales, he might repeal by ordinance 
 all the penal laws against the nonconformists; and these 
 ordinances once promulgated, and having produced the good 
 effects which he anticipated from them, he hoped that parlia- 
 ment would confirm them without hesitation. The matter 
 having been discussed between him, Sunderland, and father 
 Petre, it was agreed that the ordinance should be first published 
 in Scotland. 
 
 In order to prepare mens' minds for its favourable recep- 
 tion, the court circulated in Scotland and in England pam- 
 phlets intended to diffuse the doctrine of toleration. The 
 nonconformists were told that the private opinion of the king 
 had always been that the free exercise of religious worship 
 was a natural right; that, under the late reign, he had been 
 at times compelled to assent to the persecutions required by 
 the leaders of the church, which assumed exclusive right in 
 England, but that he was now resolved to follow the dictates 
 of his conscience, and to merit the gratitude of those of his 
 subjects who, like him, had undergone suffering for refusing 
 to take the Anglican tests. The presbyterian ministers were 
 secretly invited to resume their assemblies, being merely recolli- 
 ez 
 
228 HISTORY OF THE COUNTEK-HEVOLUTION. [1686— 
 
 mended to prudence, and not. to forget that it was to the king 
 they owed this high favour: the hope was further ex- 
 pressed that their sermons would breathe those Sentiments of 
 attachment which the king earnestly desired to merit, and 
 to gain which he ran allhazards. The presbyterian assemblies 
 upon this invitation reappeared, and to the great astonishment 
 of the members of the church of England, those who attended 
 them were no longer interfered with by authority. 
 
 Although determined to exclude the prince of Orange from 
 the succession, the government did not think it expedient 
 definitely to authorize the catholics and the nonconforming 
 protestants in the public exercise of their worship, without 
 taking steps with thé prince which should lead him to suppose 
 that he was still considered as the husband of the heiress pre- 
 sumptive, and that his approbation was deemed necessary in 
 matters, the maintenance of which would eventually depend 
 upon him. Penn the quaker, who had entered with full con- 
 fidence into the feigned plans of religious liberty, had gone to 
 Holland to make proselytes there among the English refugees, 
 and, if possible, to bring over the prince and princess of 
 Orange to views, the real secret of which was not confided to 
 him. Penn spoke much, but he was mistrusted. The prince? 
 however, concluded from his discourse that James was still 
 well disposed towards him, and expressed a desire that a per- 
 son should be sent to the Hague, with whom hé might discuss 
 the question of the tests, while die, on his part, would- request 
 the States to send as extraordinary envoy to England, a man 
 in whom he placed entire confidence. 
 
 James eagerly adopted this negotiation; but he showed, by 
 the choice of his envoy, that all he proposed was to deceive 
 his son-in-law; the man whom he deputed was an Irishman, 
 an obscure intriguer, a former spy of the Spanish govern- 
 ment, which had given him the title of the marquis d' Albeville. 
 The Jesuits had no agent m'ore corrupt, more venal, more 
 discredited; ' but they valued in him a sort of cunning which 
 rendered 'iuël^^uïtable for such a mission as this, so replete 
 with impudence. The States, upon the rumour of an ap- 
 proaching alliance between France and England against 
 Holland, sent to James, at the request of the prince of 
 Orange, the minister Dykvelt, one of their ablest statesmen. 
 His instructions referred to general policy; but he was secretly 
 
1687.] DR. GILBERT BURNET. 229 
 
 intrusted with the interests of the prince, which were already 
 those of the Anglican church and of the protestant aristocracy. 
 On the part of the. high catholics, the negotiation was not 
 serious. Accordingly, while Dykvelt declared the respectful 
 opposition of the -prince and princess of Orange to the sus- 
 pension of the tests», and demanded explanations of the 
 rumours abroad concerning the succession, d'Albeville was 
 recriminating at the, Hague. He complained of the encou- 
 ragement given by the States to the refractory conduct of the 
 church of England men; of the asylum which they gave to 
 persons whose intentions the king his master had every reason 
 to suspect; lastly, of the severity manifested towards several 
 officers of the English. regiments in the service of the States, 
 He demanded thqt. ;; tlie^^ officers, of whose, devotion to his 
 person the king was convinced, and who were then under 
 arrest, should be released; that they should also deliver up to 
 him doctor Burnet,, one of the refugees of whom the king had 
 most, reason to complain; lastly, with regard to the tests 
 which more particularly concerned the prince and princess of 
 Orange, he repeated, but with an obvious want of conviction, 
 what Penn had said in favour of the system of toleration 
 adopted by the king. 
 
 "With, regard, to the English officers, the States refused 
 satisfaction. : , The prince and princess combated the argu- 
 ments of d'Albeville as to religion,, aided by doctor Burnet, 
 the same whose, surrender was demanded by James. Burnet, 
 the atfth^iiof the. History of the Reformatio?!, and of the 
 valuable memoirs, the History of his Own Times, was one of 
 the most-distinguished men of his time, a philosopher animated 
 with an earnest faith, a judicious partisan of that practical 
 toleration -.which he did not wish to see erected into a prin- 
 ciple by tto catholics, for the benefit of their own religion 
 alone; he had been by turns beloved, consulted, and persecuted 
 by Charles II. and by James. Without compromising his 
 character or bringing his good faith under suspicion, he had 
 frequently been at the. same time the depositary of the secrets 
 of the court and of those of the* oppqsition. He had disap- 
 proved the protestant conspiracy, and defended those of his 
 friends who had risked their heads in that deplorable affair. 
 Having assisted Russell in his last moments, he composed 
 upon that great and virtuous man delightful pages, which, 
 
230 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 long after the execution of Russell, drew tears even from 
 his enemies. At length, in the last year of the reign of 
 Charles IL, he preached a sermon which the court chose to 
 treat as factious. He then quitted England; he had visited 
 France during the horrible dragoonings, Italy, Rome, during 
 a pontificate 1 inglorious for the Romish church. Wherever 
 he went, theologians and statesmen had eagerly sought from 
 him at once the instruction and the approbation of a superior 
 mind; even Louis XIV. had made advances to him. All 
 that he saw in Europe strengthened his attachment to the 
 constitution of his country and to Anglican protestantism, and 
 thinking that the safety of these could only be secured by the 
 prince of Orange, he had settled in Holland. He was high 
 in credit with the prince, and was consulted by him upon the 
 affairs of England, and assisted in drawing up most of 
 the answers which baffled the insidious propositions and 
 manœuvres of d'Albeville. No one laboured more success- 
 fully than he to enlighten the nonconformists as to the true 
 aim of the caresses which were lavished upon them. His 
 writings, printed in Holland, and almost always under some 
 piquant title, were very much sought after in England, where 
 they were clandestinely circulated. It was so greatly to the 
 interest of the catholics to seize the doctor's person, that after 
 the refusal of the States to deliver him up, he had to be con- 
 stantly on his guard: he was warned on all sides that he ran 
 the risk of being carried off by the agents of d'Albeville. 
 
 Among the refugees, there was also a Scottish lawyer, 
 named Steward, a man of very remarkable talent, and in high 
 esteem for the conduct which he had observed since the 
 restoration. Rather than abjure the covenant, he had aban- 
 doned his profession and his country; he had always been 
 regarded as the principal agent of the revolutionary move- 
 ments there emanating from abroad. The Jesuits contrived 
 to gain him over to their system of toleration. He returned 
 to England, was received at court with favour equal to that 
 enjoyed by Penn the quaker; and, like Penn, devoted himself 
 from conviction, perhaps from enmity to the church of Eng- 
 land, to the great work of bringing the dissenting sects 
 together. Earnest endeavours were now being made to in- 
 
 1 That of Innocent XI. 
 
1687.] THE TEST REPEALING ORDINANCE. 231 
 
 troduce catholics and nonconformists into the corporations 
 and popular magistracies. The king thought that this habit 
 of living together would establish firm ties between them. It is 
 true that the share of the catholics in employments was much 
 greater than that of their new allies. Still, through the in- 
 fluence of Penn and of Steward, in the renewal of the city 
 magistracies at the close of the year 1686, a quaker was 
 elected lord mayor of London, and several presbyterians, 
 notoriously opponents of the government under the last reign, 
 were made police magistrates and aldermen. Lastly, in the 
 month of February, 1687, the ordinance which was to 
 legalize these nominations and suspend the penal laws, was 
 published in Scotland. 
 
 The tenour of this first ordinance proved that the high 
 catholics, while calling the Scottish presbyterians to their aid, 
 were unwilling too greatly to encourage their revolutionary 
 spirit, and to deprive themselves for the future of the means 
 of repression furnished with respect to them by the church of 
 England tests. The ordinance drew a distinction between 
 the moderate and the high presbyterians; it authorized the 
 former to hold peaceable meetings within their houses, but 
 with regard to the latter retained the strict prohibition of 
 conventicles in the open air; it affectionately dwelt upon what 
 interested the papists, faithful subjects, it said, and too long 
 the victims of their devotion to the royal cause, too long ex- 
 cluded, under odious pretexts, from functions which their 
 enduring loyalty rendered them so worthy to exercise. Ac- 
 cordingly, the king, in virtue of his absolute power, of his 
 sovereirjii authority and royal prerogative, ivhich all his sub- 
 jects were bound to obey, willed that for the future the 
 catholics should be deemed qualified to hold every kind of 
 office, and that no other oath should be required of them or 
 of other dissenters, such as the moderate presbyterians 
 and quakers, than that of fidelity to the absolute power in 
 virtue of which the ordinance itself was promulgated. 
 
 A month afterwards an analogous declaration was published 
 in England; it was adapted to the state of the dissenting 
 sects in that kingdom, and manifested towards the noncon- 
 forming protestants none of the mistrust which excluded 
 part of those of Scotland, less capable, indeed, of using reli- 
 gious liberty with moderation. It dealt gently with parlia- 
 
232 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1686- 
 
 ment, expressing a hope that it would consent to a measure 
 . in which the king had thought it incumbent upon him to 
 take the initiative. It did not assign the absolute w r ill of the 
 king as the only reason for the abolition of the tests; but it 
 demonstrated, winch was easy enough, that after so many 
 efforts, for the last two centuries, to establish a perfect reli- 
 gious uniformity in the kingdom, it was clear that the only 
 way to conciliate consciences was the ceasing to force them. 
 All oaths of allegiance and of supremacy, and the various 
 tests, were therefore suppressed until the approaching convo- 
 cation of parliament. ' The king guaranteed to the English 
 clergy the full and entire possession of its rights; he only took 
 from it that of persecuting the nonconformists. 
 
 Most assuredly the two declarations addressed themselves 
 to very, powerful interests. The able men who had conceived 
 the idea of arousing those interests against the long odious 
 supremacy of the church of England, attacked it here in a 
 formidable manner; but it Was one thing to render the tests 
 hateful to tlie mass of the nation, and another to bring into 
 favour that absolute power, in virtue of which they were 
 suppressed: the catholics might consent to the establishment 
 of this power, which had no terrors for them; but the non- 
 conforming protestants, while accepting with gratitude the 
 religious liberty granted to them, by no means seceded4rom 
 the members of the church of England as to the protests set 
 fortfr by the latter against the principle of royal will placing 
 itself above the laws. Upon the first point, the n onconform- 
 ists sent addresses of thanks which gladdened the court, but 
 they said hot a word about the 1 secondhand it was now very 
 perceptible that, with very few exceptions, they listened far 
 more readily to the attacks of the church of England men 
 upon absolute power, than to the declamations of the catholics 
 against the Vigour of the tests. It was successfully pointed 
 out to them that these fine ideas of toleration were nothing 
 new; that, under the late reign, the papists had preached 
 them up in order to get themselves into office; that it was in 
 despair of any other means that they were resorted to then, 
 after a multitude of hideous plots; that the king himself, at the 
 time of his alliance with the church of England, was the most 
 ardent persecutor of the nonconformists; that he received, 
 indeed, with outward kindness, the protestant exiles from 
 
]687.] THE AFFAIR OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE. 233 
 
 Prance, but that he gave a very different reception to the 
 protestants whom the tyranny of lord Tyrconnel compelled to 
 quit Ireland. In fact, since he had been lord-lieutenant and 
 commander of the army, lord Tyrconnel, with all the energy 
 of his character, had been pressing forward that part of the 
 high catholic plan, which consisted in converting Ireland into 
 a camp. . He had taken the charters from the towns and the 
 corporations, and dismissed all the protestants who had been 
 employed under government, under the duke of Ormond and 
 the earl, of Clarendon. As he augmented the strength of his 
 army in proportion to the increasing audacity of his enter- 
 prise, the rich protestants had no resource left them but to 
 expatriate themselves. Some passed into England, others 
 went to- Holland, where it was the policy of the prince of 
 Orange to give them a welcome reception. 
 
 The excesses of passion almost invariably betray the views 
 of parties; the impatience to enjoy results, destroys the 
 means of arriving at them; and thus the high catholics of 
 England, while preaching liberty of religious worship, already 
 gave manifest indications of an intention to render their own 
 religion dominant. In order to secure the rising generation, 
 it was. necessary to have the direction of education: not con- 
 tent with having founded colleges where the catholic youth 
 might be brought up secure from protestant seductions, they 
 - determined to invade the protestant universities themselves. 
 In a preliminary attack upon that of Cambridge, they were 
 repulsed; but. after a very lengthened combat, they made 
 their way into that of Oxford, which had lately so impru- 
 dently declared, against the principle of resistance. The 
 presidentship of -Magdalen College became vacant; the king 
 ordered the members of the college to elect one Farmer, a 
 new catholic convert, one of those intrigants who, under all 
 systems, barter their opinions for a place. The Fellows in 
 answer laid before the king a list of the vices and misdeeds 
 of his candidate. James pointed out a person of somewhat 
 better repute, (Parker); the Fellows rejected him also, despite 
 all the threats of the kin?. n * f * . fr 
 
 Has aiiair was already causing a great deal of excitement, 
 when several letters from the Jesuits of Liege to those of 
 Friburg were intercepted in Holland, and despatched to 
 England by the refugees. These letters spoke with rapture 
 
234 
 
 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 [1687- 
 
 of the prosperous state of the Roman-catholic religion, and of 
 what the Society was doing to remove education from the 
 hands of the heretics. "We are gradually gaining ground in 
 England; we have got chairs of humanity at Lincoln, Nor- 
 wich, and York, and at Worcester a public chapel, under the 
 protection of the soldiery. Our brethren there are about to 
 purchase some houses at Wigan, in Lancashire. Our in- 
 terests are advancing most powerfully; fathers of our order 
 preach before the royal family, and in the principal churches, 
 where they attract crowded audiences of the faithful. They 
 have bought some houses in the Savoy for 18,000 florins, 
 which they are going to convert into a college." 
 
 The same letters, speaking of James IL, gave particulars 
 as to his bigotry, which completed the destruction, by the 
 force of ridicule, of a system already odious from its tyranni- 
 cal tendency. They intimated that the king had just been 
 admitted to participate in the merits of the Society of Jesus, 
 and had testified great joy at finding himself so adopted; that 
 he declared the interests of the order were his own; that he 
 would die a martyr rather than not complete, during his life, 
 the conversion of his kingdoms; that, on one occasion, when 
 a Jesuit knelt before him, he raised him, saying that it was 
 rather for the priest to receive such an homage from the king. 
 The authenticity of the letters was proved by the information 
 which they gave as to enterprises which were still secret 
 at the time they were written. They announced the future 
 elevation of father Petre to the dignity of cardinal, and his 
 approaching admission to the privy council; the replacing the 
 capuchin father, Hansel, in the post of confessor to the king, 
 by father Warner, rector of the Jesuits of Saint Orner, a 
 minor revolution, not without importance to the projects 
 of the high catholics. The letters finally mentioned an 
 observation of the king which alluded to those projects: it 
 was in answer to some one who was lamenting, in his pre- 
 sence, that his heir presumptive was an heretic: "God will 
 give me another," said the king. 
 
 There was in fact nothing but this present from Heaven 
 that could preserve the new catholic church from the accession 
 of William. Parliament, despite all the efforts which had 
 been made in the intervals of four successive prorogations to 
 detach it from the English church, had in no degree fallen in 
 
1688.] INCREASED POWER OF THE JESUITS. 235 
 
 with that system of toleration which it had been hoped it 
 would eagerly have adopted. But the government hesitated 
 at dissolving it, for it was the royalist parliament obtained at 
 the price of so much fraud in the first year of this reign. 
 New elections, notwithstanding the changes in the corpora- 
 tions, would in all probability send in men still less favourably 
 disposed. The plan of gaining time, and meanwhile con- 
 tinuing to work upon the public mind, as had been the course 
 since the rupture with the English church, was becoming 
 dangerous, for the ambassador Dykvelt, after fruitless remon- 
 strances as to the affair of the tests, or that of the universities 
 of Cambridge and Oxford, and on that of the publication of 
 the two ordinances, began to threaten the government with 
 public opinion, with the resistance of the whole English 
 nation, unless they desisted; and intimated, broadly enough, 
 that this resistance might find exalted and powerful support 
 abroad. The catholics estimated the intentions of the prince 
 of Orange, even better by their own, than from the words 
 and conduct of his ambassador, and saw that they must 
 anticipate him, in order not to be taken by surprise. They 
 dismissed Dykvelt, and rejoiced at his departure, as at a com- 
 mencement of success. Louis XIV., who has always been 
 considered better informed than Barillon as to the intentions 
 of the high catholics, directed that ambassador to do nothing 
 which might prevent the rupture between the king and his 
 son-in-law, because, instead of having any disastrous result, 
 it would facilitate the execution of his Britannic majesty's 
 designs. 
 
 To assist James in his new plans, the catholics had 
 sent over to him as confessor, Jesuit Warner, a man very 
 learned in cases of conscience, and otherwise able, the inti- 
 mate friend of father Petre. James no longer took any step 
 but under the direction of one or the other of these two, a 
 fact which soon got abroad. Father Petre was made a 
 member of the council of state. Parliament was dissolved; 
 meanwhile, they continued to labour at the bringing the non- 
 conformists and catholics together, so as, by these means, to 
 arrange a future parliament to their mind. The nuncio 
 d' Adda was publioly received at Windsor; his retinue, com- 
 posed of Romish priests and foreign monks, passed in osten- 
 tatious procession through London. Commissions in the newly 
 
236 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1687- 
 
 levied regiments were liberally distributed; fresh works 
 were commenced in several fortresses, and additional arma- 
 ments in all. the ports. Amid these preparations, carried on 
 with activity and abilit y, were heard various indiscreet boasts; 
 and facts and words manifested, r in the catholic party, a 
 redoubled ardour, due probably to some daring determination. 
 In fact, at this time, as the event showed, for the state de^ 
 liberations were enveloped in the same secrecy which covered 
 the gunpowder, plot ^nd the murder of justice Godfrey, 
 the high catholics had resolved to meet the prince of Orange, 
 not with acts of parliament, but with a prince of Wales. It 
 was doubtless, from a knowledge of this extreme measure, 
 that the marquis d'Albe ville had ventured to say to the officers 
 of the prince in Holland; " This English church, of which 
 you talk so much, will within two years be but a body with- 
 out life." - 
 
 As if the hope of obtaining fruitfulness for the queen 
 by means of prayer and pf medicine had all at once occurred 
 to the high catholics,;, there, was. .spread in the. month of 
 August a rumour of presents sent to our Lady of Loretto, 
 for the success of a journey which the queen was .about to 
 make to Bath. . The king himself was to conduct her. The 
 most extraordinary, accounts were circulated of the virtue of 
 the Bath waters; their certain effect, it was said, w^ould be to 
 remedy in the queen the natural impediments under which 
 she-laboured. The king, and queen, on their way, were to 
 offer up their devotion at the chaperof Saint Winifred, very 
 celebrated, throughout Wales, for cures of the kind which the 
 queen went to solicit; the pilgrimage and the waters together, 
 it was confidently said, would, at an early period bless her 
 majesty and the nation wit^i an heir to the crown. 
 
 The king -set out on the .first of September, and went first 
 to Portsmouth. He ha4 lately ordered considerable additions 
 to the fortifications of this town, not towards the sea,, despite 
 the importance of the port, but towards the land, a plain 
 indication of the idea which filled his mind, that he should 
 one day have to defend himself against his subjects. 
 
 From Portsmouth to Saint Winifred's Well the king tra- 
 velled slowly; he traversed the country which had been the 
 scene of Monmouth's insurrection, and of the campaign of 
 Jeffreys, and where, consequently, the religious and political 
 
1688.] THE ROYAL PROGRESS TO BATH. 237 
 
 enemies of the reigning faction had suffered most severely from 
 its tyranny. The public functionaries everywhere did their 
 utmost to get up à brilliant reception for him. Their official 
 harangues and compliments turned, as usual, upon the public 
 joy, the devotion of his subjects, and the excellence of the 
 administration/If anything could be more astonishing than 
 the unblushing impudence with which all this rank flattery 
 was represented as the expression of public feeling, it was 
 the confident complacency w r ith which James received them. 
 Inmost of his answers, he introduced the abolition- of the 
 tests; and always in connexion With toleration. He put for- 
 ward this new principle by an appearance of amiability 
 towards every one; he addressed himself in friendly language 
 alike to his friends and to his enemies, to those, even, who 
 had been pointed out to him as adherents of Monmouth. The 
 nobility and rich citizens w r ere generally on the reserve: it 
 Avas evident to them that by this conduct, so unlike the usual 
 haughtiness of his bearing, the king's sole object was to can- 
 vass votes for the next parliament. Among the lower classes 
 and the zealous sectaries, instincts and interests different 
 from those wdiich excited the distrust of the noble and 
 wealthy opened men's hearts to the promises of religious 
 liberty made by a king in person, and James, when he de- 
 claimed against the tyranny of the English church, was at times 
 applauded. Obscure deputations waited' npon him to declare 
 their adhesion to the suppression- of the tests, and were 
 received with marked distinction. The court even accepted 
 with gratification the ~ address of thé cooks of a small town, 
 who said that consciences could no more be forced in matters 
 of religion, than tastes in matters of the palate. The cooks 
 so far were quite in the right, and the uncouth sympathy of 
 the poor with the new principles of the court was affecting; 
 but the rich, in whom were vested the great national interests, 
 did not disguise their equally just suspicions, and regarded, 
 as fallen into the lowest abasement, a power which sought 
 allies in that class whence the millenarians and the levellers 
 had heretofore recruited disciples. 
 
 At Chester, lord Tyrconnel waited upon the king, to re- 
 ceive his orders respecting Ireland: there was a wdiolly dif- 
 ferent system for that country than for England. - : The affairs 
 of the catholics were there so advanced, that it was in ini- 
 
238 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1687- 
 
 mediate contemplation to destroy what they called the esta- 
 blishment of Cromwell, that is to say, the arrangement of 
 property, founded upon the great protestant colonization, 
 which had "pacified" the country in 1652, and had held it in 
 check during the whole reign of Charles II. The king 
 thought that at least five years would be necessary to com- 
 plete this revolution. Lord Tyrconnel proposed that, some- 
 how or other, it should be accomplished within a year ; that 
 then Ireland, wholly separated from England by religion, 
 should be placed under the protection of the king of France, 
 so as, whatever happened, to offer to the catholics of England 
 an asylum entirely free from the presence of protestants: his 
 plans were approved of. 
 
 In passing through Oxford, the king received the homage 
 of the various colleges. The authorities of Magdalen college, 
 which, for nearly a year, had been in open resistance, pre- 
 sented themselves like the rest. The king assailed them with 
 violent language, told them that his presence should settle the 
 business, and ordered them immediately to elect the person 
 whom he had nominated. A fresh vote had the same result 
 as all those which had preceded it. James continuing his 
 journey to Bath, handed over the authorities of the college to 
 the Court of Delegates, and they were soon replaced by Jesuits. 
 On the sixteenth of October he returned to Windsor with 
 the queen. A rumour was almost immediately spread as to 
 the happy effects of the baths upon the latter, and early in 
 November it was said that she was pregnant. By the end of 
 that month, the news, repeatedly contradicted, was given out 
 as certain. The impatience of the catholics, counting each 
 day as two, already, in the middle of December, carried back 
 to three months the period of the supposed conception. How- 
 ever, the 16th of October, after many changes, was the day 
 adopted by the queen herself, and from which, for some time, 
 the official calculations were based. The news spread by the 
 court of the condition of the queen was more and more favour- 
 able; public thanksgivings were offered up in the catholic and 
 protestant churches. Still everything around the queen went 
 on mysteriously, and created the suspicion of an imposture, 
 which numerous clandestine pamphlets sought to demonstrate. 
 A narrative of the pregnancy assumed in former times by the 
 catholic queen Mary, in order to exclude Elizabeth from the 
 
1688.] ALLEGED PREGNANCY OF THE QUEEN. 239 
 
 throne, was reprinted, and by the simple motto, idem iterum, 
 pointed out to the least prejudiced minds the precisely similar 
 attempt now suggested to the catholics by the return of similar 
 dangers. Indications in corroboration of this new fraud were 
 not wanting. The queen, from necessity or want of foresight, 
 herself furnished them. All employed about her person were 
 papists. No one was admitted to her toilette as heretofore. 
 The princess of Denmark, and the protestant ladies of rank, 
 whose testimony would have silenced all suspicion, fruitlessly 
 endeavoured, for the sake of the queen herself, and still more, 
 for that of the child she pretended to bear, to obtain certain 
 proofs, easily given to women. The queen affected scorn of 
 all imputations, and continued to surround herself with the 
 most impenetrable mystery. 
 
 Meanwhile, upon the strength of the pregnancy, or of the 
 measures taken to insure the success of the fraud, the greatest 
 efforts were made by the high catholics, that the convocation 
 of an anti-Anglican parliament might be coincident with the 
 birth of a prince of Wales. They hoped that this event 
 would prostrate their enemies, and that the nation, accepting 
 it as a pledge for the reigning family, and preferring the im- 
 putation of being duped to the being ruined by a civil war, 
 would effect against the church of England what it had 
 effected at the restoration and after the rupture of Oxford, 
 against the republicans. The congratulations which James 
 had received from the authorities during his journey, had 
 led him to suppose that he should find them disposed to concur 
 in the legal subversion of the church of England. He sent 
 to the lords-lieutenant of the counties, after having exacted 
 from them in writing a special oath of obedience, instructions 
 of so strange a nature, that they were forced either openly to 
 refuse to comply with them, or to feign not to understand 
 them. Many adopted the latter course. The instructions 
 were to form, in every county, a commission of three noble- 
 men who should swear to devote themselves wholly to the 
 will of the king. These three commissioners were to arrange 
 the impending elections by visiting all the influential electors 
 and other persons in credit, and giving them to understand 
 what the king desired of them. In many counties the lords- 
 lieutenants required explanations, urged difficulties, and by 
 gaining time, contrived to avoid the responsibility of the cor- 
 
240 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1687- 
 
 rupt measure intrusted to them; others executed the orders 
 of the court, and had his electioneering circuits carried into 
 effect. The commissioners chosen by them went from town 
 to town, saying to the rich inhabitants: If you are elected a, 
 member of parliament, will you consent to abolish the tests 
 and the penal laws, affecting creeds? Will you give your vote 
 to him whom his majesty shall point out? Will you live in 
 peace with your neighbours, of whatever religion they may 
 be, both in the kingdom and out of it? 
 
 To the first two questions, the answer was almost every- 
 where a decided negative; to the last, the ambiguity of which 
 precluded its precise comprehension, a vague reply was 
 given, but in terms so nearly the same everywhere, that they 
 seemed the result of previous concert: " We will live in peace 
 with all so far as the interests of his majesty and of the 
 government established by law will permit." It was believed 
 that the court referred to the catholics of Ireland and of 
 France, now so evidently leagued against protestantism, and 
 they desired it to be understood that they would not scruple 
 to defend themselves against them by forming a protestant 
 league. 
 
 The court, seeing itself defeated in the appeal thus made 
 in detail to public opinion, again postponed the convocation 
 of a parliament. It was evident to it, after such an essay of 
 its influence, that the nonconformists returned would be a 
 very small number. The latter, moreover, while very eager 
 to enjoy the liberty which had been accorded them, were not 
 by any means persuaded that this liberty would find its safe- 
 guard in the imposition, or even in the real birth of a popish 
 successor. The court, therefore, recurred to the means employed 
 in the preceding year. In the beginning of May a second 
 proclamation of liberty of conscience was published. In its 
 preamble, the king said that he was encouraged to renew his 
 first ordinance by the large number of addresses of thanks 
 and verbal assurances which he had received during his 
 journey. The happy effects of this ordinance had already 
 been amply appreciated, according to him, by all wise per- 
 sons; the country had enjoyed the most profound peace. "If 
 certain changes," he added, " had been made in the civil and 
 military departments, it was because the welfare of the 
 service required the removal of men obstinately attached to 
 
1688.] 
 
 RESISTANCE OF THE BISHOPS. 
 
 241 
 
 the maintenance of tests, whose abolition had been acknow- 
 ledged essential to the repose and prosperity of the country. 
 The ordinance terminated with the formal assurance that a 
 parliament should be assembled at the latest in November. 
 
 Last year, the catholics had confined themselves to publish- 
 ing the ordinance by the medium of the official press. They 
 now determined upon giving it a publicity more offensive to 
 their enemies, and accordingly obtained from the council an 
 order, directing the Anglican bishops to have it read twice in 
 every church in their dioceses. The first reading was to take 
 place on the 20th May in the metropolitan churches, and in 
 all those within a circle of ten miles. It was thus that the 
 famous proclamation of Oxford had been made known to 
 all England in 1681; and it was kept in mind with what 
 .zeal the bishops had then rendered this service to the court, 
 and had subsequently maintained, and had inculcated in ser- 
 mons, the doctrine of passive obedience. The catholics thought 
 that, in virtue of this doctrine, the bishops would now be 
 obliged to act against themselves, and, as father Petre ex- 
 pressed it, to eat their own filth. But it was not to be so; 
 for parties never deem themselves bound by the obligations 
 which they impose upon others. The church of England men, 
 heretofore absolutists against the presbyterians, were now 
 independents as against the catholics. The bishops, before 
 the day fixed upon for the first reading of the ordinance, 
 assembled in London at Lambeth palace. The course of 
 reasoning by which they passed from their principles of 
 blind submission to the doctrine of resistance, exhibit those 
 tricks of the intellect, by which men think, while contra- 
 dicting themselves, to prove that they have never ceased to 
 be consistent. " It is," said they, " illegal to dispense with 
 the laws under circumstances contrary to the object of these 
 laws. The king has no power to commit an illegal act. On 
 the other hand, he is considered by the laws as incapable of 
 doing wrong; therefore, the present declaration as to liberty 
 of conscience cannot be regarded as proceeding from the king, 
 since it is illegal: consequently, without failing in their 
 obedience, the bishops cannot obey the order to publish the 
 declaration." 
 
 Founded upon these data, a petition to the king was drawn 
 up, and signed by the bishops of Saint Asaph, Ely, Chester* 
 
 R 
 
242 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 Bath and Wells, Bristol, Peterborough, and the archbishop 
 of Canterbury. They presented it on the evening preceding 
 the day when the first reading was to have taken place in 
 London. They endeavoured to show that it was not from a 
 spirit of insubordination that they declared their repugnance 
 to reading the declaration; nor was it from hostility to the 
 nonconformists, for it seemed to them that the time had 
 arrived when these should be treated with moderation; but 
 parliament alone could alter the laws concerning them; and 
 that what especially obliged the petitioners to supplicate his 
 majesty not to insist upon the reading of his declaration, was 
 that of its being founded upon a dispensing pciver, which parlia- 
 ment had always considered illegal. Now the church could not 
 consent to give a solemn publicity to what parliament did not 
 sanction. The form of the petition was respectful; it was 
 filled with expressions of devoted loyalty, but still the refusal 
 of obedience was distinct and positive. The protest against 
 absolute power, though proceeding upon a nice distinction, 
 was, under existing circumstances, an act of great public 
 importance. In the absence of a parliament, the church served 
 as the organ of public opinion. In the affair of doctor Sharp 
 a first example of resistance had been given by the bishop of 
 London. His trial had interested the whole nation; but 
 here the resistance was collective; there was nothing in it 
 alarming to the nonconformists, the petition, taking their 
 situation also into its consideration, and detaching them in a 
 measure from the court. A general contest between all the 
 powers of the counter-revolution and public opinion in all its 
 possible modes of manifestation, would therefore follow the 
 protest of the bishops, if the court undertook to force them to 
 obey. 
 
 James hesitated between the two courses open to him, of 
 withdrawing the declaration or punishing the bishops' peti- 
 tion. He at length adopted the advice of chancellor Jeffreys, 
 a man of ready resource when legal pretexts for acts of vio- 
 lence were required. Jeffreys asserted, that the manner in 
 which the bishops had drawn up their petition was tumul- 
 tuous, and consequently liable to prosecution by law; where- 
 upon the bishops were summoned to appear before the 
 council. This did not intimidate the lower clergy. In most 
 of the churches they abstained from reading the declaration. 
 
1688.] PROGRESS OF THE ALLEGED PREGNANCY. 243 
 
 One clergyman, ascending the pulpit with the ordinance in 
 his hand, said to the congregation that he was forced to read 
 it aloud, but that he knew of no law which obliged them to 
 stay and hear it; the church was instantly empty. In the 
 few places where the court was obeyed, the congregations, of 
 their own accord, quitted the churches. The fortnight be- 
 tween the sitting of the council at which the impeachment 
 of the bishops was resolved upon, and that at which they were 
 to appear, passed on. The greatest agitation prevailed in 
 London during the whole of this time. The troops employed 
 to maintain order, themselves exhibited disaffection. The 
 king saw too late that in persisting in his declaration, and 
 causing those who protested against it to be prosecuted, he 
 had taken a resolution at once dangerous in itself and pecu- 
 liarly unseasonable: for it was already the eighth month of 
 the pretended pregnancy of the queen, and it required all the 
 address and all the power of the catholic party to carry this 
 fraud into effect. Public security was the chief condition of 
 success, and this they were about to disturb by an enterprise 
 which rendered all kinds of accusations more credible. 
 
 According to the reports then believed, and which may 
 now be considered as the truth, with regard to the affair of 
 the succession, up to the commencement of April, no one 
 knew with any certainty whether the pregnancy of the 
 queen was feigned, or whether the pilgrimage and the waters 
 of Bath had been so successful as to enable her to become a 
 mother after seven years' sterility. But on the 9th of April 
 the queen met with an accident, the circumstances of which 
 could not be entirely concealed, and after the occurrence of 
 which a pregnancy was necessarily out of the question. If 
 the pregnancy were genuine, the accident was a simple mis- 
 carriage; and if, from the beginning, it was a fraud, the 
 accident itself was of a nature to render the perseverance in 
 the fraud utterly preposterous. The queen, however, conti- 
 nued to display all the appearances of pregnancy, the progress 
 of which was imperfectly sought to be imitated in her shape 
 by the increasing amplification of her dress, and the art of 
 her attendants. This manœuvre lasted during the months of 
 April and May — the alleged sixth and seventh months — 
 without any new accident occurring to betray it; but public 
 incredulity saw, in the mystery which surrounded the queen's 
 
 r2 
 
244 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 rising and going to rest, matter for daily conversation, and 
 which proved more and more as the term approached. Spite 
 had some share in the diffusion of the first suspicions, but 
 the same reports, confirmed because not denied, now excited 
 indignation. The people already saw before them the com- 
 pletion of this audacity — a false prince of Wales, a child who 
 would destroy the protestant religion, imposed upon England» 
 
 The impeachment of the bishops occurring just at the 
 moment when the fear lest the papists should succeed in 
 getting their prince of Wales accepted had taken possession 
 of the public mind, immensely encouraged this fear. The 
 nation, which had resigned itself to the reign of James, as to 
 a sort of political tempest beyond which it saw sure repose, 
 appeared once more, in defence of its last hope, the same 
 that it had shown itself at the time of the popish plot. Pre- 
 vious to the day when the bishops were to appear before the 
 council, a multitude of persons of all ranks went to visit 
 them; the approaches to their houses were thronged with 
 crowds of people waiting their turn to present themselves. 
 When they went before the council, business was everywhere 
 suspended: the public business was now the trial of the 
 bishops. The enormous population of London, quitting their 
 homes, filled the streets around the palace, awaiting the de- 
 cision of the council. After waiting some hours, they learned 
 that the bishops were about to be transferred to the Tow T er 
 by water. The multitude rushed towards the wharfs to see 
 them on their way; the excitement was at its height; the 
 most menacing cries were uttered: but when the exasperated 
 masses saw the. bishops appear, and when these, extending 
 their hands soliciting peace, gave them their benedictions, 
 they knelt, recovered their composure, and then dispersed in 
 silent consternation. 
 
 While London was thus agitated in the early part of June, 
 the court was preparing for the feigned accouchement of the 
 queen. According to the calculation hitherto admitted, and 
 which reckoned the necessary period of nine months from the 
 16th of October, the queen was now in her eighth month. 
 She had announced her intention to quit Whitehall in the 
 middle of June, and pass at Windsor the month which still 
 remained of her time. But this announcement was only 
 
1688.] the queen's alleged accouchement. 245 
 
 given to mislead thé persons who were bound by their posi- 
 tion in the state to be present at the accouchement, and who 
 thus hoped to unmask the fraud. It was considered that 
 they would remain at their country seats until the middle of 
 July, and the better to secure this, it was given out at one 
 time that the queen would go to Windsor, at another time, to 
 Richmond, and then again to some other royal residence. So 
 early as May, they had managed to have the princess of 
 Denmark ordered to drink the waters at Bath; it was hoped 
 that, deceived like the rest, she would remain there until the 
 queen's supposed term. As to the archbishop of Canterbury, 
 another witness as interested in keeping a close watch upon 
 the affair as he was difficult to deceive, he was at "the Tower. 1 
 The queen seemed thus tolerably secure of having her con^ 
 finement when she chose, and in the presence of select wit- 
 nesses, when suddenly the arrangement was disturbed by the 
 news of the immediate return of the princess of Denmark, 
 who, not feeling herself benefited by the Bath waters, was 
 preparing to rejoin the queen. The first plan was àt once 
 changed: the queen declared, on a further calculation of dates, 
 that she believed herself at least a twenty days more advanced 
 than she had hitherto supposed; that she could not go to 
 "Windsor, and would immediately retire to Saint James's, 
 wmere she would be confined. It was represented to her 
 that there was nothing ready for her reception there; but she 
 replied, in a tone as though the pains already warned her of 
 an impending delivery, that she would go at once. Every- 
 thing was hastily got ready at Saint James's, and the very 
 day after her arrival, the 10th of June, before any one was 
 informed of her sudden removal, and at the hour when the 
 protestant ladies of the court were at church, for it was 
 Trinity Sunday, she sent to inform the king that she was in 
 
 1 This explanation of die absence of the princess of Denmark and the 
 archbishop of Canterbury has been preferred to that given in the Memoirs 
 of James II. According to him, the princess went to. Bath expressly that 
 she might not see whether the queen was brought to bed or not, and thus 
 malignantly to generate the suspicions which would naturally result from 
 her absence. The archbishop, from similar motives, purposely got sent to 
 the Tower. It is by statements of this stamp that the disciple of the 
 Jesuits Warner and Petre seeks to transfer the charge of imposture to his 
 adversaries. 
 
246 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 labour. Reckoning from the 16th of October, as she had 
 hitherto done, she had been pregnant six days less than eight 
 
 months 
 
 There were with her only two women of the bedchamber, 
 one under woman of the bedchamber, and the midwife. The 
 countess of Sunderland, wife of the prime-minister, and lady 
 Bellasis, a catholic, came afterwards. The king himself 
 arrived last, bringing with him twenty high personages, mem- 
 bers of the upper house and of the privy council. The Dutch 
 ambassador received no intimation. The king and his train 
 stood in a row opposite the queen's bed, which was placed in 
 an alcove concealed from view by thick curtains, closed with 
 the greatest care. The ladies were in the alcove, which com- 
 municated with other apartments by a side door. The queen 
 cried out. The women exclaimed that she was delivered; 
 one of them came out of the alcove carrying a parcel of 
 clothes, in which the infant was supposed to be enveloped; 
 but no child was seen or heard. The countess of Sunderland 
 made a preconcerted sign to the king, upon which he an- 
 nounced aloud to those who surrounded him, that a prince of 
 Wales was born, but the expression of joy which he attempted 
 to assume was disturbed with much anxiety. The assumed 
 witnesses of the accouchement departed without having seen 
 anything, and the news w r as immediately made public. After 
 this scene, which she went through with equal presence of 
 mind and energy, the queen made no attempt to prove that 
 she had really been confined: the princess of Denmark re- 
 turned three days afterwards, and was not admitted into the 
 secret of the alcove, which remained wholly with the countess 
 of Sunderland, lady Bellasis, and the popish women of the 
 bedchamber. Doctor Chamberlain, who had before attended 
 the queen on such occasions, was not called in either before or 
 after the operation. He thought at first that another physi- 
 cian had been employed, but if so, it was never known from 
 whom the queen received the assistance indispensable to a 
 woman in childbirth. It was not a case of negligence, but a 
 choice between two inconveniences, that of dispensing with 
 some of the circumstances which should have established 
 the fact abroad, and that of admitting too many persons into 
 a secret of such importance. 
 
 As to the child, the physicians who saw it the first day or 
 
1688.] TRIAL OF THE BISHOPS. 247 
 
 two, found an appearance of strength very extraordinary in a 
 child born before its time, and of a mother whose health was 
 so feeble. However, the child did not live. A second sub- 
 stitution took place, got up with so much haste, that the ne- 
 cessary precautions could not be taken. The doctors called 
 in to see the invalid child were at first shown an infant which 
 evidently could not live beyond a few moments; they looked at 
 each other in amazement, when, after an absence of half an hour 
 in consultation, they were introduced to what purported to be the 
 same child, healthy, and without any trace of suffering. It was 
 requisite, so glaring was the substitution, to offer this clumsy 
 explanation, that there was something miraculous in this 
 sudden recovery. They retired, without venturing, for the 
 time, to say anything, and the two frauds were, for awhile, 
 confounded as one in the public mind. Fetes, commanded 
 by the court, celebrated the birth of the pretended prince of 
 Wales. The population of London took no part in them; nor 
 did they attempt to disturb them, but reserved all their mani- 
 festations of discontent or of joy for the affair of the bishops, 
 which was going on all the while, regarded by father Petre 
 and the high catholics as a useful diversion. 
 
 Six days after the birth of the prince of Wales, the bishops 
 were brought from the Tower to the bar of the court of king's 
 bench. On their way, they found the whole city in move- 
 ment; they traversed an immense concourse of people, by 
 turns kneeling devoutly to receive their blessing, or erect, 
 and making the air resound with acclamations. The bishops 
 were followed by a numerous train of rich and distinguished 
 persons, and women of the highest rank already thronged 
 Westminster-hall; and when the bishops assumed their seats 
 on the prisoners' bench, a great number of peers took their 
 stand behind them, in public testimony that they deemed the 
 cause of the seven prelates their own. 
 
 Xever, since the general insurrection of the English 
 against the ministry of Laud and Strafford, had society been 
 known to be so excited and so combined in one great purpose. 
 Accordingly, the French ambassador, Barillon, already wrote: 
 " It seems as though this affair were a trial of strength be- 
 tween the two parties, and that the popular party has in every 
 respect the better of that of royalty." The bishops' counsel 
 demanded to be allowed to prove that the arrest was illegaL 
 
248 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 The judges did not permit them to plead this question, but 
 consented to the bishops being set at liberty, upon their 
 giving security to reappear in a fortnight. This temporary 
 release of the bishops was received as a presage of success by 
 the multitude, who besieged the streets of Westminster, and 
 by whom the bishops were escorted to their residences, amidst 
 transports of joy. 
 
 When night came, London was illuminated; the demon- 
 strations of delight were even somewhat tumultuous. The 
 authorities had prohibited all persons to leave their houses and 
 to assemble in the streets beyond a certain hour; but after seven 
 years of timid obedience to the least commands of this kind, 
 every one felt the want to go abroad among his neighbours, 
 to assimilate himself with the general ardour, to mix with 
 those whose society he had scrupulously avoided in the days 
 of terror. Patience had long been brooding over secret 
 thoughts, which men now felt the necessity of intercommu- 
 nicating. After being so wretchedly divided, all the enemies 
 of papacy and of absolute power were once more friends, 
 without any previous explanation. During the fortnight 
 allotted to the bishops to prepare their defence, the nobility, 
 citizens, and people, seized every opportunity of manifesting 
 the interest they took in this cause. During the same inter- 
 val, the court proposed to renew the fêtes in celebration of 
 the birth of the prince of Wales. One day a display of fire- 
 works was to be exhibited near Whitehall: the populace 
 imagined that the papists were again about to set fire to 
 London, and directed their steps towards Whitehall, spread- 
 ing this dark rumour; but a storm having in the afternoon 
 destroyed the preparations, there was no end to, the raillery, 
 which the populace, on dispersing, lavished upon this little 
 miscalculation of the court: some of them, indeed, saw in it a 
 judgment of God, who had felt Himself braved in the rejoic- 
 ings for this imposture, for by this name the people now; 
 ordinarily characterized the birth of the prince of Wales. 
 
 On the 8th of July, the bishops were to appear for the 
 second time. They traversed the city amidst transports r 
 which exceeded even those that the population of London 
 had been manifesting since the commencement of this affair. 
 Somewhat of anxiety was now mingled with impatience. 
 The multitude, although exalted by the sentiments created 
 
1688.] 
 
 TRIAL OF THE BISHOPS. 
 
 249 
 
 by this spectacle of their strength, understood with won- 
 derful perception all that the cause, when decided, would 
 add to, or diminish of this power, according to the sentence. 
 Out of four judges who composed the court, two approved 
 the bishops' petition. The jury, though great pains had 
 been taken to select it, were not devoted to the papists. The 
 crown counsel, venal but clever men, could not count upon 
 more favour from the tribunal than their adversaries. Thus, 
 despite their efforts, in preparing the case, to prevent the de- 
 fendants from bringing into question the dispensing power of 
 the king, it was upon the constitutionality of this power that 
 the tribunal had to pronounce. The bishops were brought 
 up before it as guilty at once of disobedience and of rebellion; 
 of disobedience, in having refused to cause the declaration to 
 be read in the churches; of rebellion, in having addressed to 
 the king, printed, and propagated, a petition in which, under 
 pretext of justifying their refusal, they attacked the king's 
 authority, and sought to bring it into contempt. The counsel 
 for the bishops, on the other side, maintained that, if the 
 king had not the power of dispensing with the laws, the 
 bishops were entitled to resist an order emanating from that 
 power; that they were at full liberty to intreat the king not 
 to exact from them what, in conscience, they did not think 
 they could do; finally, that they were justified in permitting 
 their respectful and loyal petition to be printed and distri- 
 buted: now, had the king this power of dispensing with the 
 laws? They demanded permission to prove the contrary. 
 
 The <îourt consented to hear them upon this question ; and 
 from that moment they had gained the cause. It was im- 
 possible to meet their arguments upon the consequences of a 
 power, which they went largely into a description of, in its 
 most general action, not only as to religious affairs, exercised 
 for the benefit of such or such a sect, but extending to all 
 those laws which guarantee the political rights, the life, the 
 liberty, and the property of the subject. These words 
 w T hich have power only when liberty and property are really 
 menaced, could not be pronounced on this occasion without 
 exciting universal transports and applause. The bishops' 
 counsel made an admirable use of the position which the 
 tribunal had allowed them to take. It was not merely a 
 recent usurpation which they assailed, but the system of 
 
.250 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688* 
 
 usurpations which constituted the counter-revolution. They 
 proved that the power of dispensing with penal laws was 
 nothing else than absolute powder under a different name; the 
 same power which the parliaments had struggled against 
 during the last reign, in the affair of the declaration of in- 
 dulgence, and then in that of the minister, Danby; the power, 
 finally, the questioning of which had been taken away from 
 the people by surprise, in the case of sir Edward Hales, and 
 in virtue of which the papists had been put in possession of 
 all the places under government. The crown counsel, obliged 
 to defend the system, that is to say, to prove that the power 
 of dispensing with the laws was inherent in the royal prero- 
 gative, merely irritated the public without producing any 
 marked impression on the court. 
 
 During the ten hours which these arguments occupied, the 
 populace remained, as it were, encamped all around the hall, 
 vehemently adopting all the impressions which reached them 
 by the medium of those who had made their way into the court; 
 abusing or applauding the witnesses who came out, according 
 as they were pointed out as favourable or unfavourable to 
 the accused. The court also received constant intelligence. 
 In the evening, the king set out for the camp at Hounslow 
 Heath; he felt the need of being surrounded by his troops; 
 he passed the night in the general's tent. The whole of the 
 same night was spent by the jury in deliberation. It 
 was not till early on the 9th that the decision was made 
 known. The votes were divided, but the bishops were de- 
 clared Not Guilty, As soon as the word acquittal was heard, 
 the crowd dispersing spread the news in every direction. 
 The public joy was immoderate: all London was illuminated, 
 and in the bonfires the pope was burnt in effigy, amidst 
 boisterous dancing and merriment. From London the com- 
 motion passed rapidly to the camp at Hounslow Heath, and 
 the soldiers followed the example of the people. James 
 heard their joyous cries from his tent, and in this way 
 learned the intelligence, which utterly surprised him, for he 
 had not doubted that the bishops would be condemned. He 
 hastily left the camp for London, devoured by anxiety and 
 resentment. When he re-entered the city, it was illuminated 
 and resonant of rejoicing; he could not but sorrowfully call 
 to mind its silence in the fêtes ordered some days before 
 for the birth of the prince of Wales. 
 
1688.] DESIGNS OF THE CATHOLICS. 2ÔT 
 
 The high catholics found, by the circumstances and the result 
 of the affair of the Anglican bishops, that they no longer had 
 the courts of law at their disposal; that the people had ceased 
 to fear them; that the army would no longer serve their pur- 
 pose. But having succeeded in the main features of what they 
 had undertaken, despite the moderate catholics, having ex- 
 cluded the protestants from the succession, they believed that 
 time and cautious management would do the rest; that the 
 birth of a prince of Wales would cover their usurpation; 
 that, for the future, they need only labour to strengthen it. 
 
 They looked upon the conquest of the country as nearly 
 concluded, and imagined, that under the shadow of this royal 
 birth, against which, as yet, none but unimportant protests 
 had arisen, they should, without fresh violence, by continuing 
 to flatter the nonconformists, by vitiating and perverting 
 the institutions w T hich were still left standing, by promising 
 a parliament, and deferring its convocation under various 
 pretexts, and by purging the army of its enemies, and aug- 
 menting its numbers, be able gradually to organize and con- 
 solidate their system. The prince of Orange, indeed, still 
 gave them some uneasiness; his congratulations on the 
 queen's accouchement did not so blind them as to make them 
 believe him the dupe of the trick which deprived him of 
 his right to the crown; but they did not think that, during 
 the life of the legitimate sovereign, his father-in-law and 
 their master, he would venture to attempt anything; and if 
 James lived only ten years longer, they felt confident that, 
 before that time expired, their power would be secure from 
 all external attacks. The catholics were mistaken in this 
 calculation. The birth of a prince of Wales was far from 
 sufficient to terminate the dispute commenced by the bill of 
 exclusion; and the affair of the bishops, on the contrary, 
 commenced a new struggle. The advantage which the nation 
 had. just gained, was so evidently the result of the energy 
 with which it had armed itself, that it was useless to expect 
 that, after this successful essay of its strength, it would sub- 
 mit to what might be again undertaken against it by worn- 
 out deceptions. It had arrived at the point at which insur- 
 rection seems legitimate, because it is possible; and it is well 
 known that nations never retrace their steps, when a first 
 impulse has been given them by the feeling of their power. 
 
252 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 Now, as in 1640, it was men of high rank who became 
 the leaders of the people; but no longer with the generous 
 inexperience which, at that period, carried them beyond their 
 principles and their desires. Knowing what they had to lose 
 and to gain in the revolutionary game, which had now become 
 inevitable, they felt it was for them to commence it, in order 
 that it might not be against them. A single revolution in 
 the palace might abruptly cut short the question between the 
 catholics and the protestant religion, between royalty by 
 divine right, and royalty by the permission of the people; they 
 decided upon undertaking it: and, if it was in their parti- 
 cular class interest, it was also for that greatest of the 
 general interests of England, that interest which had armed 
 the dictatorship of Cromwell, which had necessitated the 
 restoration, and erected the scaffold of "Russell and Sidney, 
 the interest of order. Order was now endangered by the 
 high catholics, because, in fabricating a prince of Wales, they 
 had deprived the nation of the hope which was its only secu- 
 rity amidst its destroyed liberties. The nation, to recover 
 the liberties indispensable to its prosperity and enlightenment, 
 could not arouse itself without occasioning protracted trou- 
 bles, without its distribution into classes and religious sects 
 once more creating the distinction of religious and political 
 parties hostile to each other; it could not touch the govern- 
 ment, without taking next in hand the defective state of 
 society. The protestant aristocracy knew how to preserve 
 the abuses in which it was interested, by viewing English 
 liberty not only as the property of the people, but as the 
 patrimony of the legitimate successor of James. It invited 
 over the prince of Orange, that he might recover from the 
 papists the crown, of which a false prince of Wales threat- 
 ened to deprive him, and the national liberties, which were to 
 be the apanage of that crown. 
 
 [i b^ilqa-r vja'iam 
 bittow bin, J>ri£rga3 ïo siisftii 
 
 . 
 
1688.] PROMISES OF THE PRINCE. 253 
 
 OHAPTFR V 
 
 aicffi iftgi 
 
 iq ojeIt 
 Tx4E REVOLUTION OF 1688. 
 
 t^ /ip * K i? v i i '■ i i n - . -n . r \ • 
 
 Deputation of tne English lords to tne prince— Promises of the prince— 
 
 His instructions respecting the protestant dissenters— Definitive recon- 
 ciliation between the. protestants of all sects— Favpuraole disposition of 
 • the fleet and the army towards the prince — The petition of the English 
 lords — State of affairs in Europe in 1688 — In what manner they pre- 
 vented Louis XIV. from affording assistance to James IL— Warlike 
 preparations of the prince : — Discussions amongst the refugees on the 
 - subject of the prince's manifesto — Departure of the expedition — Apathy 
 of James and of the Jesuits- — William's fleet driven back by a tempest — 3 
 The Jesuits arouse themselves at this news — William departs a second 
 time— His landing — Flight of James IL— The part taken in the revolu- 
 tion by the nobility and citizens— Hopes of the people deceived — 
 I Establishment of a royalty by consent. doBS OÎ 
 
 ;ni iuodiiir . 
 
 In the year 1686, lord Mordaunt, who had been conspi- 
 cuous in the parliament of 1685 for his energetic opposition, 
 had gone to Holland, to persuade the prince of Orange to 
 take an active part in the affairs of England. As at this 
 time the nation had not taken a decided resolution; and, 
 moreover, as lord Mordaunt inspired less confidence as a man 
 of judgment and secrecy, than as an ardent patriot and a 
 good protestant, the prince of Orange had not adopted his 
 views as to the opportuneness and facility of a descent upon 
 England; but merely replied in general terms, that he would 
 have an eye to the affairs of England, and would conduct 
 those of Holland in such a manner as to leave him at liberty 
 to act whenever he should think it expedient; that if the king 
 assailed the rights of the princess his daughter, changed the 
 established religion, or sought, by getting up imaginary plots, 
 
254 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 to destroy the eminent men who defended it, he would do all 
 in his power to save interests so dear to him. 
 
 Acting upon this promise, which was conveyed to England 
 by lord Mordaunt, the prince of Orange, in the political rela- 
 tions between England and Holland, had so well mixed up 
 his own private grievances against James IL, with the dis- 
 satisfaction occasioned to the government of Holland by the 
 political shuffling of James's ministers, as to insure his 
 country's taking a direct interest in seconding him in the 
 endeavour, at some future time, to maintain his wife's rights 
 to the crown of England. He had also seized the oppor- 
 tunity of the revocation of the edict of Nantes so to alarm 
 the protestant states of Europe, and to cause it to be looked 
 upon as so very probable that a new general war would arise 
 against Louis XIV., a war in which he would again act the 
 part of leader of the anti- French league, that he was almost 
 wholly in a position to levy and put troops in motion, without any 
 one's being able to determine against what enemy he was leading 
 them. The correspondence of doctor Burnet, the goings and 
 comings of so many English protestants, the memoranda 
 collected by the ambassador Dykvelt during his mission, had 
 drawn the prince into a combination of diplomatic and mili- 
 tary preparation, of which he alone possessed the secret. 
 Email} 7 -, a very nice question, between himself and his wife, 
 had been settled by the mediation of doctor Burnet. The 
 prince was, by the English laws, called only to a titular 
 royalty, subordinate during the life of his wife, a position 
 which little suited a man of his character. The princess, 
 on being solicited by doctor Burnet to declare the manner in 
 which she would act towards her husband, if she ever came 
 to the crown of England, had engaged to resign all authority 
 to him as soon as she herself should be invested with it, 
 and this promise had been received by William as the one 
 encouragement wanting in the pursuit of his project. 
 
 After lord Mordaunt, the earl of Shrewsbury, who, at a 
 time when conversions from protestantism to Catholicism 
 were, at the English court, a sure road to preferment, had 
 abandoned Catholicism for protestantism, came in the year 
 1687, not to solicit a premature intervention, but merely to 
 explain to the prince of Orange the disposition of the higher 
 
1688.] 
 
 RECONCILIATION WITH THE DISSENTERS. 
 
 255 
 
 classes of the English, and the general state of affairs. The 
 prince of Orange, although fully decided, thought fit to hold 
 out only vague hopes to the earl; but his measures as to 
 Holland and Europe were already almost complete, when the 
 affair of the bishops and the birth of a prince of Wales so 
 suddenly changed the relative position of the English people 
 and the government of the high catholics. 
 
 The prince sent M. Zuiestein to compliment James upon the 
 birth of an heir. This ambassador had secret instructions to 
 sound the court and the high clergy, and to counsel the 
 bishops to profit by the popularity which they had gained by 
 their resistance, to bring the nonconformists back to them. 
 The prince desired that the question of his right as against 
 those of the pretended prince of Wales should be in England, 
 the question of protestantism without any distinction of sect, 
 against Catholicism. Dykvelt, on quitting England, had laid 
 great stress upon this view of the matter, and the churchmen 
 had ever since been actively endeavouring to bring about a 
 reconciliation in which they made all the advances. The non- 
 conformists in general had placed no faith in the promises of the 
 catholic faction; they had joyfully accepted liberty, but only 
 as a provisional concession. The Anglicans in guaranteeing 
 them, after the expulsion of the papists, that liberty, which 
 they said the fear that their mutual enemies might profit by 
 it, had obliged them to refuse them, left less room to doubt their 
 intentions. The bishops, in their petition to the king, had 
 not failed to express the wish that for the future there might 
 be no more nonconforming protestants; but they had, at the 
 same time, declared that to the parliament alone belonged the 
 right of annulling the laws of uniformity which might be 
 no longer necessary. The counsel for the bishops had argued 
 to the same effect; all the writings published on this affair 
 by the church of England, had spoken of the nonconformists 
 as of brothers from whom they would no longer be separated 
 by the ancient and harsh laws w r hich had always been prin- 
 cipally directed against the papists. Moreover, conferences 
 had taken place between the presbyterians, the quakers, the 
 anabaptists, and the Anglican churchmen; and in the hope of 
 a happier future they had mutually sunk many old grievances 
 in oblivion. They had in turn allied themselves to the court 
 
256 
 
 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. |~1688. 
 
 and the papists from interested motives; it was a common 
 error, and could only be repaired by a frank and enduring 
 reconciliation. This reconciliation had been effected with 
 eclat in the affair of the bishops. As these devoted them- 
 selves in the name of all, there was not one among the non- 
 conformists who was not proud of being represented by 
 them. The population of London had, as in the papist plot, 
 rallied around the protestant interest, and the same union 
 took place throughout the kingdom. 
 
 In the early part of June, admiral Russell, cousin-german 
 of him who had been decapitated under Charles II., went to 
 Holland to announce part of these great results to the prince 
 of Orange. Since the tragical end of the man whom he re- 
 garded as the glory of his family, the admiral had quitted the 
 service and the court. He was a man of honour, ardent in 
 his principles, and universally esteemed. A great many persons 
 of high rank and influence had charged him to speak to 
 the prince clearly and distinctly, and to learn from him, posi- 
 tively, if he was in a position to prevent at once the final 
 attempts of the papists or the evils which would result from 
 a general insurrection of the English against a government 
 odious to all. William replied that, if a decided number of 
 Englishmen of distinction were to invite him, as much in 
 their own name as in that of their partisans, to come and 
 restore to the nation its privileges and to religion its security, 
 he thought that, towards the end of September, he should be 
 able to meet the appeal. The admiral returned to England; 
 he was soon joined by Sidney, brother of the illustrious 
 Algernon, who hastily returning from Italy on hearing of 
 the events which were agitating England, bad remained for 
 some time in Holland. Sidney had in 1679 been English 
 ambassador to the Hague; he was, of all the English w^ith 
 whom the prince was acquainted, him for whom he felt the 
 most regard. He deserved it for many noble qualities, and 
 among those which rendered him most valuable in an enter- 
 prise of this kind, for a discretion, a clearness of judgment 
 which gave authority to his selections and guaranteed the 
 secrecy of the communications between the prince and the 
 English lords. As ho was somewhat deficient in activity, the 
 prince associated with him a relation of Dr. Burnet, named John- 
 ston, whose extreme diligence rendered him a valuable agent. 
 
1688.] PROGRESS OF THE ORANGE REVOLUTION. 257 
 
 On meeting in England, Mordaunt, Shrewsbury, Russell, 
 and Sidney, set about preparing the invitation upon which 
 the prince of Orange had promised to act. They sounded the 
 marquis of Halifax, the ex-minister Danby, the earl of Not- 
 tingham, the earl of Devonshire, three of the principal 
 officers of the army, Trelawny, Kirk e, and lord Churchill, 
 and those among the bishops who had distinguished themselves 
 in the late resistance. The marquis of Halifax, from the 
 first, showed that he would not compromise himself ; the earl 
 of Nottingham, when initiated in the secrets of the conspi- 
 racy, was all at once checked by scruples, and gave this excuse 
 of feeble minds, that he earnestly desired the success of the 
 enterprise, but could not conscientiously aid it. The earl 
 of Devonshire and Danby warmly adopted the project. 
 Danby gained over the bishop of London, and through him 
 six of the bishops whose trial had just been brought to a ter- 
 mination. Kirke, a striking example here of the facility 
 with which good and evil are forgotten in agitated times — 
 Kirke, who had been named among the patriots, since the 
 insolent reply he gave to James, when this monarch endea- 
 voured to convert him, en^a^ed himself in his own name, and 
 in that of the troops under his command. Lord Churchill, 
 the future Marlborough, adopted the same views. He had 
 long been the favourite and almost the friend of James. 
 Distinguished at court by a superiority of intellect and a luxury 
 of life which placed him far in advance of the most brilliant 
 nobles, he already exercised over the princess of Denmark that 
 ascendancy which was afterwards to raise him to so high a 
 fortune; the counterfeit birth of a prince of Wales having 
 entirely separated the interests of the princess from those of the 
 king her father, the young lord had abandoned the king in 
 this rupture; he promised to side with the prince of Orange 
 immediately upon his appearance, and to get the prince and 
 princess of Denmark to do the same. Trelawny also gave his 
 word to William's agents, and brought over with him the bishop 
 of Bristol. Johnston, incessantly going and coming between 
 Scotland and England, and England and Holland, himself 
 conducted the whole correspondence of the conspirators. He 
 would go to Holland, and inform the plotters there of the fresh 
 accessions made in England and Scotland by their friends, and 
 then return to encourage the latter by the recital of what was 
 
 s 
 
258 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 doing in Holland to support them. The secret, although 
 known to persons whose numbers were constantly increasing, 
 was well kept, because in this kind of enterprise a secret is 
 always preserved in proportion to the chances of success, and 
 the government of James had become too feeble to attract any 
 deserters. 
 
 It was not until the month of August, that lord Russell, Sid- 
 ney, Johnston, and the earl of Shrewsbury, quitted England, 
 not to return to it, until accompanied by the prince of 
 Orange. They were furnished with the letters of invitation 
 which the prince had desired to have. A few weeks only 
 had elapsed since the termination of the bishops' trial; 
 the system of conciliation adopted by the high catholics had 
 been so quickly comprehended by the nation, and had so em- 
 boldened its contempt and resentment, that this system was 
 no longer tenable, and it became necessary again to have re- 
 course to violence; but they had no longer any troops on 
 whom they could rely. After the trial of the bishops, the joy 
 of the soldiers encamped on Hounslow Heath had not so soon 
 subsided as that of the London populace, but had, on the con- 
 trary, assumed a far more alarming character. The few pa- 
 pist soldiers who served in these regiments all at once became 
 objects of the abuse of the protestant soldiers, who had, on 
 several occasions ill treated them. Toasts, threatening to the 
 papists, had been vehemently applauded in the noisy festivals 
 held in honour of protestant anniversaries. It had become 
 necessary to break up the camp, to distribute the regiments as 
 after the restoration, and to discharge a certain number of the 
 more turbulent men, who became still more dangerous dis- 
 seminated among the people, at a time when the people 
 needed nothing to put them in motion but energetic encou- 
 ragement. 
 
 In the town of Portsmouth, which was looked upon by the 
 high catholics as their bulwark, the disposition of the troops 
 was manifested at the same time by the refusal of all the 
 officers to obey an order given by the king. This regiment, 
 commanded by the duke of Berwick, the king's natural son, 
 had been chosen, as better affected than any other, for an 
 essay at re-organization, which was to introduce five Irish 
 catholics into each company. Several officers having refused 
 to receive the Irish, the king cashiered them by a council of 
 
1688.] 
 
 DISAFFECTION OF THE FORCES. 
 
 259 
 
 war. All their brother officers immediately sent to resign 
 their commissions. The king found himself obliged either to 
 accept these resignations, or to renounce the enrolment of the 
 Irish soldiers: he had the weakness to regard the latter 
 alternative as that dictated by prudence; and yet it was one 
 of his favourite maxims, that the soldier who hesitates is in a 
 state of mutiny. 
 
 Things were carried yet further on board the fleet of eighty 
 men of war which had been assembled by the king on infor- 
 mation of the warlike preparations which were going on in 
 the month of July, in the ports of Holland. A papist, admiral 
 Strickland, having received the command of this fleet, had 
 taken priests on board with him. These priests one day pre- 
 paring to celebrate mass on board his vessel, the sailors broke 
 out into threats and murmurs, which passing from vessel to 
 vessel, gave reason to fear a general insurrection of the fleet. 
 The king himself hearing of the affair, hastened to the spot, 
 but order was only established by the dismissal of the catholic 
 priests. The marine forces were far more decided than the 
 soldiers in their hatred to the government of the Jesuits; they 
 had continually before their eyes the spectacle of the superior 
 condition of their rivals, the French navy; they saw them- 
 selves condemned, not only to abstain from undertaking any- 
 thing for the glory of their country against Louis XIV., the 
 enemy of the liberty of nations and of the protestant religion, 
 but, for the greater part of their time, to lend their aid to 
 that king against a man who for twenty years had given to 
 Holland that part in the European drama, which the reign of 
 Elizabeth and the administration of Cromwell seemed to have 
 for ever assigned to Great Britain. Thus the feeling of the 
 English mariners was not only disaffection to the government 
 of James, but an evident sympathy with the character and 
 actions of that William whom they regarded as the chief of 
 protestant Europe; and these were the first adversaries whom 
 James would oppose to his son-in-law, if he undertook to cross 
 the sea to dispute with him the right to the crown. 
 
 The prince of Orange had proceeded without awaiting the 
 return of lord Russell and the other English lords. As he 
 had received exact information, during their stay in England, 
 of the progress of their measures, and knew that the inclina- 
 tions of the nation, of the fleet, and of the arnry, gave him a 
 
 s2 
 
260 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 sufficiently clear invitation, he thought himself in a position 
 to announce to doctor Burnet, in the month of July, that in 
 October he would be in England, with an army of fifteen 
 thousand men. The petition of the English lords was then 
 not required at this period to decide the enterprise, but as 
 an authority for it in the eyes of those who, seeing the arrival 
 of the prince, might demand by what right a stranger pre- 
 sented himself to defend English liberty. This important 
 document, attributed more peculiarly to the earl of Danby 
 and doctor Burnet, was drawn up with a perfect appreciation 
 of all the interests and all the opinions which were to be con- 
 ciliated and brought over to one sole and only mode of en- 
 franchisement: it enumerated the long list of the grievances 
 of England against James since the seizure of the charters, 
 which were attributed to his influence when duke of York, 
 down to the substitution of a prince of Wales, the latest out- 
 rage of the catholic faction against the country. All the cir- 
 cumstances of the pretended pregnancy and accouchement 
 were set forth and observed upon in such a manner, as to 
 communicate to the public that conviction, upon this matter, 
 which it was important that the prince of Orange should ap- 
 pear to have acted upon. The document was secretly sanc- 
 tioned and adopted by men whom no one would have expected, 
 some years before, to have seen combined, in a step of this 
 kind; those who had been the most violent in the last royalist 
 reaction, and those who had conspired with the illustrious 
 patriots, Russell and Sidney; those who more recently had 
 aided the duke of Monmouth, and those who had fought 
 against him; but time, the force of circumstances, and the 
 march of interests triumphed thus over the finality which all 
 parties, at one time or other, so foolishly set up. 
 
 Dating from the month of July, William was fixedly 
 decided on invading his father-in-law's states. The principal 
 condition of success, the good will of England, was secure; 
 but it was necessary to collect sufficient forces? in order that 
 they might have nothing to fear from fortune, in the event of 
 any portion of James's fleet or army remaining faithful to 
 him, and of the king's seeking to determine all in one action; 
 it was necessary to obtain the assistance of the Dutch republic, 
 and to interest throughout Europe, in the success of the enter- 
 prise, sufficient powers to prevent Holland, in undertaking 
 
1688.] 
 
 LOFTY POSITION OF LOUIS XIV. 
 
 261 
 
 an expedition so daring, and depriving herself of part of her 
 troops to carry it out, from having anything to fear from 
 Louis XIV. 
 
 Louis XIY. was interested in maintaining on the throne 
 of England a king who answered for the neutrality of this 
 nation, a fettered yet ever menacing rival. It was to the 
 abasement of England, under a government engaged in a 
 struggle against its sentiments, its wants, and its progress, 
 that Louis XIV. in a great measure owed it that he had 
 not been interrupted in his successes. Born to be at the 
 head of that great French movement, to which, for twenty 
 years, the interests of all Europe had been subordinate, 
 those of continental Europe by war, those of England by 
 the reign of the Stuarts, Louis XIV. had still need for the 
 Stuarts to reign; and this was the secret of his friendship 
 for them. Ten years had elapsed since the peace of Nyme- 
 gen; he had employed them in completing, by forced inter- 
 pretations of that peace, obtained from the exhaustion of 
 Europe and the mercenary compliances of Charles II., the 
 territorial position of France, in raising all things in the 
 interior of his kingdom to the level of his powerful external 
 situation. During these ten years he had, without firing a 
 single shot, annexed to France, Strasburg, the duchy of Deux- 
 Ponts, the petty seigneuries dependent on the Palatinate, and 
 on the electorate of Treves, the principality of Orange, the 
 county of Avignon, the towns of Casal, Alost, Courtray, 
 Dixmude, &c. During this time he had built Rochefort, Brest, 
 and Toulon; had formed his powerful marine, burnt Algiers, 
 put to ransom Tripoli and Tunis, humbled Genoese liber ty, 
 saved that of Venice menaced by the Turks, established the 
 French settlements in India, drawn to Versailles the ambas- 
 sadors of the kings of several barbarous nations, and finally, 
 covered France with establishments, which at once proved 
 extreme prosperity and extreme slavery. Europe, during 
 the same time, had been so divided in her interests, or so 
 weakened, as to be unable to attempt anything against this 
 nation, aggrandized, by her submission to a despotism which 
 gave unity to its long scattered forces. But Spain w r as in 
 continual alarm for her possessions in the Netherlands; the 
 empire had to demand satisfaction for a multitude of petty 
 usurpations; Holland and all the protestant states of Ger- 
 
262 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 many, believed themselves threatened by the revocation of 
 the edict of Nantes; pope Innocent XL, insulted, even in 
 Rome, had excommunicated the French ambassador; the 
 English detested Louis XIV. in that Jesuit government 
 which he upheld, despite the contempt of all Europe. No- 
 thing was wanting to spring the mine of such infinite dis- 
 contents against France but an occasion; this presented 
 itself; and, in the European commotion, the vastest that ever 
 took place, the revolution, so desired by the English, was 
 merely a necessary episode. 
 
 Whilst William was planning the means of keeping secret 
 from Louis XIY. the preparations for his expedition, the 
 elector of Cologne, Ferdinand of Bavaria, the faithful ally of 
 the Dutch republic, died. The position of Cologne, which 
 commands twenty leagues of the course of the Rhine, and 
 which borders on the east a part of the Dutch frontier, ren- 
 dered the alliance of the elector who should succeed Ferdi- 
 nand, of great importance to the Dutch republic; on his part, 
 it was the interest of Louis XIV. that this successor should 
 be favourable to him; he supported a certain cardinal de 
 Furstemburg, against whom, accordingly, the princes of the 
 protestant states along the Rhine, the empire, and the court of 
 Rome, immediately declared. The latter, already engaged in 
 a quarrel with the court of France as to the liberties of the 
 Gallican church, and the insults which had been offered it at the 
 very gates of the Vatican, openly proclaimed against cardinal 
 Furstemburg; a long contest arose. Louis XIV. threatening 
 to instal his cardinal, in spite of Rome and in spite of the 
 empire, the prince of Orange had at once a pretext for making 
 warlike preparations, a ground for summoning the enemies of 
 French influence to a general coalition, and, finally, the cer- 
 tainty of being able to occupy Louis XIV. upon the Rhine in 
 such a manner that he could not interfere with Ins designs 
 upon England. 
 
 An opportunity, which alone had been wanting to the 
 plans long meditated by William, once found, everything aided 
 their execution with an astonishing rapidity. In a few weeks 
 the famous league of Augsburg united against France, 
 Austria, Holland, Bavaria, Spain, Brandenberg, Saxony, Den- 
 mark, Sweden, Savoy, and the Roman states; a formidable and 
 singular coalition, in which the entire body of the protestant 
 
1688.] COALITION AGAINST JAMES. 263 
 
 states were seen upholding the decision of the pope against 
 cardinal Furstemburg, and the powers which had ever been 
 the enemies of protestantism, Bavaria, Austria, and Spain, 
 taking up arms against the king who had just revoked the 
 edict of Nantes. England alone, compelled to inaction, took 
 no part in this immense movement: and, accordingly, in the 
 bosom of the European conspiracy against Louis XIV., it was 
 fain to form one nearly as vast against James II. The states 
 of Holland at first considered the military preparations already 
 made by William as useful demonstrations in the affair of 
 Cologne; but taking things in a higher point of view, they 
 saw that the sacrifice of men and money, which the prince 
 demanded of them for an expedition to England, would be the 
 saving of the republic ; that England, once free, would imme- 
 diately assume among the enemies of Louis XIV. the station 
 appertaining to her power and her national enmity to France. 
 The protestant states, whose interests were more peculiarly 
 mixed up with those of Holland, adopted the same views, and 
 promised to appropriate thirty thousand men, in the absence 
 of William, for the defence of the Dutch territory. Most of 
 the coalesced powers, on being successively put in possession 
 of the secret, felt the necessity of securing the concurrence of 
 the English nation, and saw that they would secure this by 
 placing William at its head, and that such a man, at the head 
 of such a nation, attacking in rear the power of Louis XIV., 
 would soon change his haughty triumphs into humiliations. 
 European policy was thus armed by William, without there 
 being any personal animosity against James on the part of 
 the princes who desired his fall. 
 
 Things were already nearly in this state in the beginning 
 of September, and the relations between the Anglican church, 
 the aristocracy, and the prince, had attained the point described, 
 without the slightest suspicion on the part of James of what 
 was being prepared against him. Still apparently determined 
 to convoke the parliament in November, he was pursuing 
 those miserable, petty intrigues which he thought would give 
 him a lower chamber opposed to the tests and favourable to 
 the dispensing power, when the advice to take instant measures 
 for resisting the impending invasion of the prince of Orange, 
 was given him by Louis XIV. through Barillon. To this 
 advice Barillon added, in his master's name, the offer of a 
 
264 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 body of fifteen thousand men who should land at Portsmouth, 
 and a squadron which should watch the movements of the 
 Dutch. James would not believe in the existence of the 
 danger. It is said that he adopted the opinion of Sunderland, 
 that a French army, unless it were large enough to meet 
 every danger, would, by its presence alone, deprive the king 
 of the hearts of his subjects. Such was the absurd confidence 
 which James placed in the supposed affection of his subjects, 
 after all that he had done to destroy it, that when Albeville 
 came in all haste to inform him of what was passing in 
 Holland, he received express orders to announce every- 
 where that the preparations in Holland had no other object 
 than the affair of Cologne; and James himself, in order not 
 to counteract this ridiculous assertion, thought fit to abstain 
 from any demonstration. Louis XIV., losing all hope of 
 overcoming this obstinate incredulity, endeavoured to intimi- 
 date the States, by signifying to them that between himself 
 and the king of Great Britain there existed so close an 
 alliance, that he should consider every attempt against the 
 territory of that prince as an attempt upon his own crown. 
 James, despite this public proceeding, persisted in the idea of 
 keeping his subjects from the impression which their belief 
 in the menaced invasion might produce in their minds. He 
 contradicted Louis XIV. as to the alliance notified by this 
 king to the States, and continued not only to speak, but to 
 act as a man who enjoyed the most profound security. 
 
 Already, however, the military preparations of the prince 
 of Orange had so evidently England for their object, that the 
 prince and the States themselves no longer took any pains 
 to conceal the fact. The contingents promised by the pro- 
 testant states covered the eastern frontier of Holland; ten 
 thousand men, the best infantry of the republic, were en- 
 camped at Nymegen, waiting but the order to advance towards 
 the sea; a considerable number of transports were ready on 
 the coasts of North Holland. Admiral Herbert, brother of 
 the magistrate who had succeeded Jeffreys in the office of 
 lord chief justice, was in this province, directing with as much 
 activity as precision all the preparations for embarkation. 
 Herbert, the most distinguished of British sailors at that 
 period, had for several months abandoned the court of James. 
 His lonç^ and blind devotion to that monarch rendered his 
 
1688.] disputes of William's English advisers. 265 
 
 rupture with the catholics more striking ; and from that time, 
 those who knew his ambition, and the proud and vindictive 
 turn of his character, foresaw that he would not long remain 
 an inactive malcontent. William destined him to command 
 the invading fleet, a post in which his talents, and still more 
 the influence of his name on the minds of the English mariners, 
 rendered him invaluable. Seventy ships of war were ready at 
 several points to convoy, under his command, the Dutch 
 expedition. The transport ships were to carry, besides 15,000 
 soldiers and about 6000 horses, 30,000 muskets for an insur- 
 rection of the English, if it were found necessary. Their 
 purchase had been long completed, and nothing was wanting 
 to commence the embarkation but the negotiation of a loan of 
 four millions of florins, required by William from the States. 
 Nearly all Europe knew this, yet James still refused to believe 
 in any design of his son-in-law on the crown. But perhaps 
 this apparent incredulity was, after all, but the calculation of 
 cowardice; for without avowing his fears, James made his 
 troops assume positions which had for their object the securing 
 his flight to Portsmouth in case of necessity. 
 
 Towards the end of September, the four millions of florins 
 were lent to William, to the great astonishment of the French 
 and English ambassadors, who had expected the interposition 
 of protracted difficulties in the affair. The day of embarkation 
 was then fixed for the oth or 6th of October. 
 
 During the seven or eight days which preceded this com- 
 mencement of the war, a fierce contest of interests and opinions 
 took place among the English who were collected round 
 William. We have already shown how many men, hitherto 
 separated by the discords of the counter-revolution, had all 
 at once agreed to come together to Holland to solicit the 
 intervention of William. The majority of them, former mem- 
 bers of the administration under Clarendon, under the Cabal, 
 under Danby, under James himself during his influence as 
 duke of York, and since he became king, up to the time when 
 the catholics seized the helm of affairs, were malcontents of 
 old or fresh date, resolved upon expelling the Jesuits. Long 
 opposed to each other, they had no principles in common. 
 That which supplied the place of these was that aristocratic 
 interest which, at the aspect of popular scenes, too closely 
 resembling those which began the revolution, had determined 
 
266 
 
 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. 
 
 [1688. 
 
 them to seek William, in order to oppose a protestant to the 
 papists, and to the inferior classes a king. But besides the 
 great lords who for six months had quitted England, there 
 were at the Hague a considerable number of refugees — 
 independents, who had been persecuted in the earlier years of 
 the restoration; presbyterians, who had been persecuted in 
 England under Clarendon, and in Scotland, from the restora- 
 tion until the first decree of toleration; whigs, who had been 
 so long victims of the re-action at Oxford; the surviving 
 Eye House conspirators; and soldiers, escaped from the 
 disasters of Argyle and Monmouth. Hitherto wandering 
 about the German protestant states, these fugitives of so 
 many different epochs had hastened to the Hague, hoping, 
 by means of this expedition, to behold their country once 
 more, and ready to co-operate in the enterprise. Their 
 hatred to James II. was not, like that of the noble emigrants, 
 founded upon the recent facts which had in England replaced 
 the Anglican church in the first rank of resistance, and 
 rendered the cause of the bishops dear to the people; its 
 character was more extensive, but apart from the actual state 
 of things. It was a protest against nearly all that had been 
 done since the restoration. 
 
 The difference between their views and those of the lords 
 who had invited William broke out, when the prince desired 
 to consult both the one and the other party as to the mani- 
 festo which he should address to the English, on commencing 
 the expedition. A form of declaration, based upon the views 
 of the lords, — that is to say, which dwelt principally upon the 
 abolition of the tests, the trial of the bishops, and the impo- 
 sition of a prince of Wales, was supported by the nobles. 
 Their adversaries advocated another declaration, drawn up 
 by one Wildman, an old agitator of Cromwell's army, and 
 they brought over to it several distinguished personages, 
 amongst others, lord Mordaunt and the earl of Mansfield. 
 Wildman first sketched out the theory of the English constitu- 
 tion, and enumerated all the violations of that constitution; 
 which, according to him, justified the insurrection about to be 
 attempted. Now the greater number of these infractions 
 belonged to the reign of Charles II. Wildman and his friends 
 even maintained that they were more grave, more perilous, 
 than those with which the reign of James was reproached; 
 
1688.] EMBARKATION OF THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. 267 
 
 that the latter had merely assailed the supremacy of the 
 Anglican church, whilst the former, in seizing upon the 
 charters, in the laws against the press and the militia, in arbi- 
 trary imprisonments, had overthrown the fundamental liberties 
 of the nation. The dispute resolved itself into this — should 
 they accept the reign of Charles II., or should they condemn 
 this reign in common with that of James II. ? The system of 
 abuse and violence which Wildman and his friends desired to 
 have attacked in its whole, was so closely connected throughout, 
 that the partisans of the first declaration were evidently dis- 
 ingenuous in pretending that the natural separation of the 
 two reigns was manifested by the facts; but they urged with 
 success this important consideration, that, by a statement of 
 grievances extending so far back they would alarm the dig- 
 nified clergy and a great portion of the nobility, who had 
 been participators in most of the tyrannical acts charged upon 
 the reign of Charles II., and might thus, perhaps, drive them 
 to a reconciliation with James. This argument carried the 
 first declaration, but still with some modifications proposed 
 by Wildnian's party, which referred to the principal abuses 
 of the reign of Charles, but attributed them to the secret or 
 declared influence of James, and thus made him alone the 
 guilty person. The two refugee parties were not satisfied 
 by this compromise as to the intention of each other. As 
 always happens in such cases, they postponed a fuller expla- 
 nation until the success of the common enterprise, and mean- 
 time each hastened to secure an ally in the nation. 
 
 Admiral Herbert put to sea in the first days of Octo- 
 ber with a powerful division, which was to cover the assem- 
 bling of the transport-ships and the embarkation of the 
 troops. He was to advance far enough up the Channel to rally 
 round him, if possible, the English squadrons which it was 
 presumed James had sent to reconnoitre. The embarkation 
 commenced on the 6th of October. It was nearly six months 
 since the trial of the bishops had manifested the feeling of 
 England. From the period of that affair, the action of 
 James's government upon it had been well-nigh null; every 
 chance of offending the people had been carefully avoided; 
 the judges had received orders to act on their circuits with 
 the greatest moderation, to diffuse everywhere new hopes, 
 and to promise a parliament in November. But these last 
 
268 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 attempts at conciliation had been understood; the most afflict- 
 ing reports reached the court from ever y quarter at once. The 
 judges had been treated with such contempt, says an histo- 
 rian, that the rules of decency were scarcely observed towards 
 them, even while they were seated on the bench, and this at a 
 time when the progress of an insurrectionary spirit among 
 the soldiers and sailors was manifested by the tumultuous 
 conduct which has been referred to. The great movement 
 in European politics during August and September had been 
 looked upon by the English as the signal of deliverance which 
 they had expected for the last five years. The preparations 
 of the prince of Orange were universally known at once by 
 the medium of a conspiracy whose ramifications extended 
 over all England, and by the efforts which the government 
 had made to persuade her that the preparations of the prince 
 of Orange did not alarm it. 
 
 The high catholics were at last fain to shake off an apathy 
 so cowardly or so ill-devised. Information, which it was no 
 longer possible to doubt or to deny, made known the move- 
 ments of admiral Herbert. The court sought to make it 
 appear as though it were just enlightened upon a great error, 
 hy declaring that it had been betrayed by the minister Sun- 
 derland, whom it dismissed as having sold himself to the prince 
 of Orange, a man who had kept the king in this state 
 of fatal security. Such was not at all the case: Sunderland 
 had faithfully served James and the catholics from the time 
 he had possessed their confidence. In his endeavours to 
 maintain himself in one of the most difficult of possible posi- 
 tions, between a king whose imbecility excited his pity and 
 a faction whose passions and expectations he in no degree 
 shared, he had displayed an ability which would almost com- 
 mand our respect, were it not that all this sagacity and pow r er 
 of resources was employed to satisfy immense personal wants 
 at the cost of the honour and liberty of his country. When 
 Sunderland beheld the near approach of a catastrophe which 
 he had foreseen, and knew that he could no longer prevent 
 it, or maintain himself in the office which had ministered to 
 his luxury and profusion, he accepted his disgrace as the best 
 service that James could render him; he thought it would 
 justify him in the eyes of a new master. 
 
 After his departure, the court precipitately made a few 
 
1688.] CONDUCT OF JAMES. 269 
 
 preparations which more resembled demonstrations than a 
 plan of resistance. The fleet, commanded by lord Dartmouth, 
 did not receive the decided orders which alone befitted such 
 an emergency. It was superior in numbers to that of ad- 
 miral Herbert, but it remained in a state of inaction, though 
 there was no other field of battle for James than the sea, upon 
 which William was about to unfurl his standard, with the 
 attractive device, Je maintiendrai. By land, an army of 
 thirty thousand men was quickly assembled. The regiments 
 taken from the garrisons and encampments around London 
 were ill-disposed; those from Scotland were somewhat more 
 devoted. The Irish sent by lord Tyrconnel were full of 
 enthusiasm for the cause of the king; and it was the same 
 with all the catholic officers. Most of the protestant officers 
 had given their secret adhesion to the agents of the prince of 
 Orange. James, by his conduct and his presence, might 
 have overawed their resolution, but he did not possess that 
 warlike spirit which he had so frivolously displayed for the 
 last three years at the camp of Hounslow. He gave the com- 
 mand in chief to the earl of Feversham, and remained 
 in London occupied — it seems hardly credible — in disputing 
 about the grievances of the nation with his ministers, and in 
 conferring with the Anglican bishops, in order to obtain their 
 intercession for a reconciliation between himself and their 
 church. 
 
 The bishops were already, for the most part, engaged in 
 the conspiracy. They accordingly offered peace, upon con- 
 ditions which they thought would revolt the haughty spirit of 
 James; but, to their great astonishment, there was no con- 
 cession to which he was not willing to descend. He restored 
 its charters to the city of London, promised to dissolve the 
 ecclesiastical commission, to reinstate the authorities of Mag- 
 dalen college; to convoke a free parliament as soon as calm 
 should be established; he finally offered to give public proofs 
 of the birth of the prince of Wales. At his request, the 
 countess of Sunderland deposed that the queen had one day 
 taken her hand to make her feel the child within her bosom, 
 but she could not venture to affirm that she had really satis- 
 fied herself as to the queen's condition. A washerwoman 
 declared that she had found upon the queen's body linen cer- 
 tain marks of an accouchement. Several ladies spoke of traces 
 
270 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 of milk which they had seen on her linen; and, finally, lady 
 Wentworth took an oath that she had touched the queen and 
 felt the child move, but she did not specify an exact period, 
 any more than the other ladies had done, which gave much 
 latitude to mental reservations. These unsatisfactory testi- 
 monies, which were collected, printed and distributed with 
 profusion, produced no effect upon public opinion. The same 
 objections were insisted upon, as to the king's age and infir- 
 mities, the weak state of the queen, the death of her four first 
 children, her seven years' sterility, the ridiculous pilgrimage 
 to Saint Winifred's, the offerings made to our Lady of Loretto, 
 the pregnancy represented as miraculous during seven months, 
 the time of conception, all at once put back a full month be- 
 fore that previously assigned to the miracle, the confinement 
 before the proper time, the removal of the princess of Den- 
 mark, the situation of the bed in the chamber, the existence 
 of the side door, the entire ignorance of the whole matter on 
 the part of the so-called witnesses brought by the king into 
 the chamber, the absence of the physicians, the impossibility 
 of getting any one single person to testify to the fact of the 
 queen's delivery, the only fact which could derive weight 
 from such tardy evidence. 
 
 The inquiry, though so public, had no better success than 
 the restitution of the charters and the redress of various 
 grievances; the people said, very naturally, that these repara- 
 tions were the work of the prince of Orange. And in fact, 
 at the end of twenty days, passed in mortal anxiety, the court, 
 having heard that a furious tempest had obliged the Dutch 
 expedition to return to port, and that the fleet of admiral 
 Herbert had undergone considerable damage, all at once 
 changed its attitude and language. James, thinking that he be- 
 held divine aid in that which the people, saddened by the same 
 intelligence, called a papist wind, withdrew his promises, and 
 recalled all his concessions. The writs for a new parliament, 
 which were ready for issuing, were suspended; he had published 
 an act of amnesty for all the offences to which the affair of 
 the tests had given rise; he revoked it. The high catholics, 
 who had for a moment feared that James would abandon them, 
 drew around him, filled with an ardour which returned to 
 them with hope. As the season was already advanced, they 
 thought that the prince of Orange would be forced to put off 
 
1688.] 
 
 JAMES REVERTS TO HIS TYRANNY. 
 
 271 
 
 his expedition until the spring, and upon this supposition, 
 hastily concocted a new plan: to convoke a parliament, to 
 carry the election by undisguised violence, to destroy the 
 opposition of the upper chamber by creating an hundred and 
 fifty peers, to bring over all the troops from Ireland, to de- 
 mand money and twenty thousand men from Louis XIV.; 
 such was the last counsel given to James by the Jesuits. 
 
 It was in the unavoidable path, it was the fatality of the 
 English counter-revolution, to attack at last that aristocracy 
 by which its first progress had been supported. Between 
 the throne and the religious democracy there was no longer 
 any ecclesiastical peerage, but, in its stead, a vain phantom of 
 liberty of conscience. Absolute power now thought it could 
 no longer maintain itself, but by exciting wide ambition in 
 the citizen class and among the gentry, by prostituting to 
 them the temporal peerage. But the peerage, without the 
 splendour of names, without fortune, without the species of 
 sanctity attached to the rarity and antiquity of its privileges, 
 would be nothing but the shame-bringing offspring of the 
 common degradation of the prince and of the subjects. In- 
 stead of that, so to speak, disinterested body, standing be- 
 tween the nation and royalty, partaking of both, which had 
 defended the national liberty against the Cabal ministry, and 
 against the whig parliaments the prerogatives of the crown, 
 the upper chamber would become the representative of an 
 interest, foreign to the soil and rejected by England, the 
 interest of the Jesuits. Charles IL, even in his most cruel 
 extremities, had never recourse to such an expedient, de- 
 structive of the constitution which permitted it. James had 
 first offended the peerage by elevating to its honours the 
 ignoble Jeffreys; and the suspicion of this last expedient, 
 counselled by the Jesuits, rendered more service to the prince 
 of Orange, than the tempest, in dispersing his vessels, had 
 done him harm. 
 
 But, even had the prince been obliged to defer his expedi- 
 tion until the spring, the Jesuits would not have passed the 
 winter in peace: the people were not disposed to wait so 
 long; they had scorned the advances of the court, when it 
 thought itself necessitated by the approach of the prince of 
 Orange to make advances; finding it retract them with so 
 much insolence at the news of a disaster, the extent of which 
 
272 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 it exaggerated, they themselves assumed the language of 
 menace and commenced war. During the latter part of Oc- 
 tober, frequent riots took place in London; the catholic chapels 
 were pillaged and destroyed. The 5th of November, the 
 anniversary of the gunpowder plot, witnessed the renewal of 
 the disorderly scenes which had followed the acquittal of the 
 bishops. They had no news of the prince of Orange; but 
 despair or hope displayed themselves in equally formidable 
 shapes, whether the papist wind made them fear new dangers, or 
 the protestant wind restored to the expedition all its chances. 
 
 At length, the court and the people learnt almost at the 
 same time the second departure of the prince of Orange and 
 his landing in Devonshire. He had left Holland the 11th 
 November, yielding to an east wind which would either 
 destroy his fleet, or carry it rapidly to the coast of Great 
 Britain, and on the 15th entered Torbay, after having 
 doubled the South Foreland without meeting one of James's 
 vessels. 
 
 The king having been unable to ascertain the exact point 
 upon which William purposed landing, had directed his 
 troops north and east, towards those places which he thought 
 most threatened. The prince appearing in the w T est, it 
 .was necessary to countermand the order, and to bring all 
 the forces together on one central point; Salisbury plain 
 was indicated as the rendezvous. Eight or ten days elapsed 
 before the principal regiments had assembled there. The 
 prince of Orange remained all this time at Exeter, confining 
 himself to distributing in the neighbouring counties his mani- 
 festo and the petition of the English lords. It w^as not expe- 
 dient for him to display more activity; the few troops he had 
 brought with him needed rest after a stormy passage, and 
 could only be considered as the nucleus of an army which 
 would be made up of James's own troops, if their feelings 
 were really such as had been represented. It seemed, on the 
 other hand, that James ought to have been the first at the 
 rendezvous at Salisbury, there to receive the different troops 
 as they arrived, and assure himself of their good will before 
 the chiefs, whom he suspected to have been gained over by 
 the prince, could meet and deliberate upon what they should 
 do. The conduct of the prince and his principal adherents, 
 was of a nature to show him that the question would be 
 
1688.] ROYALIST DEFECTIONS. 273 
 
 wholly decided between two armies in the open field; the 
 prince, and the English lords, the avowed leaders of the 
 enterprise, carefully avoided any appeal to that considerable 
 portion of the population who, once armed, would demand 
 more than a revolution at court; they did not excite the 
 people to insurrection; they knew the danger of admitting 
 them into the quarrel; they considered that, for the interests 
 of order, the soldiers whom James had armed in his own 
 cause, were already enough; they only desired to draw these 
 to their side, and not to raise others. This conduct of the 
 Orange party had already a chilling effect upon the people 
 in those places where he had anticipated some disturb- 
 ances. They were astonished at not finding in his manifestos 
 anything to inflame their passions, or hold out promises to 
 their wants; they waited until the course of events should 
 explain that which at present they did not comprehend; and 
 the prince, a week after his landing, was still at Exeter, 
 master of a territory, of limited extent indeed, but placed 
 between two seas, and secure from any surprise. 
 
 James, instead of profiting by this state of uncertainty, 
 was forming interpretations of it at London with the high 
 catholics. They saw, in the silence which William observed, 
 a certain proof that the people of the western counties were 
 a devoted to the government. The Londoners, on the other 
 hand, not having seen either the Dutch or the prince of 
 Orange, and being in the immediate presence of the catholic 
 leaders, were in a great ferment. James wished to quell 
 them before he went to Salisbury; he managed to get up a 
 skirmish between some Irish detachments and the appren- 
 tices and workmen who. were about to destroy the chapels 
 and convents; and he gave way, with childish passion, to this 
 street warfare, until the news arrived that desertions were 
 beginning at Salisbury. He then left for the army, but only 
 arrived in time to witness the desertion of lord Churchill, the 
 duke of Grafton, and colonel Barkley. Lords Colchester and 
 Cornbury, colonel Godfrey, the earl of Abingdon, captain 
 Clarges, and a great many other officers, were already in the 
 prince's camp. Still, from the same causes which kept 
 back the people in the district occupied by the prince of 
 Orange, the soldiers and subaltern officers were still unde- 
 cided. The grounds of the prince's invasion did not appeal 
 
 T 
 
274 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 so nearly as they desired to their interests. The deserters 
 hardly numbered a thousand men. It was easy and advan- 
 tageous to replace the chiefs who had quitted, by ambitious 
 officers, taken from the inferior ranks. The cavalry was 
 very superior in number and quality to that of the prince 
 of Orange. The effective of the royal troops amounted to 
 nearly thirty thousand men; the prince had at the utmost 
 but fifteen thousand. If a battle had taken place at once, it 
 would perhaps have proved fatal to an enterprise from which 
 it was sought to exclude the people. The pupil of Turenne 
 ought to have known the power of activity; a glance at 
 the map would have shown him how easy it were to shut up 
 the prince in Cornwall, and to deprive him of every commu- 
 nication with the rest of England. But fearing to be ar- 
 rested by his own generals and delivered to the prince, he 
 returned to London. He had scarcely left the camp, when 
 the earl of Feversham was obliged to order a retrograde 
 movement; and in this movement whole regiments were led 
 by their chiefs to the prince. 
 
 The earl of Feversham had hardly quitted Salisbury, when 
 the prince of Orange marched towards this city, joined in his 
 way by the royalist troops who had left their standard. The 
 retreat of the royal army was to him a victory. The result 
 of the contest, so distinctly declined by James, now being 
 quite clear, the large towns vied with each other in the prompti- 
 tude of their adhesion to the enterprise; Bath, Oxford, Not- 
 tingham, York, Berwick, Hull, and Bristol outstripped the 
 others. The nobility were everywhere seen at the head of 
 the movement. The citizens rallied to a cry which seemed in 
 the midst of an insurrection to express merely a legal de- 
 mand. This cry, A free parliament, was as unhesitatingly 
 adopted by the people. It did not blindly hurry them inta 
 unknown changes, but simply summoned them to fulfil in the 
 elections a duty which they well understood. Owing to the 
 judicious arrangements of the prince of Orange, which directed 
 that the priests and other agents of the Jesuits should be sent 
 out of the way quietly, the disorders which result even from 
 the most legitimate vengeance were prevented. At London, 
 on the contrary, the last efforts of James to defend his chapels 
 and his priests aroused in the people the revolutionary pas- 
 sions of 1640. Fathers Petre and Warner were the first to 
 
1688.] THE KING TREATS WITH THE PRINCE. 275 
 
 be terrified: they fled from England. They were bold coun- 
 sellors, and, to a certain extent, able, but not men of action; 
 ever since the affair of the bishops they had lost all judgment, 
 
 James, abandoned by the popish priests, and believing 
 himself incapable of resistance, although he was still obeyed 
 by the troops which the earl of Feversham had brought back 
 to London, summoned all the protestant lords in London, and 
 asked them whether they were still attached to him. They 
 swore that they were; for although victorious without, they 
 were, in London, at his discretion, had he any energy remain- 
 ing. He appeared fully to accept their assurances, and began 
 to play the pathetic; he solicited their counsel; he asked, in 
 a broken voice, what he had done to his subjects that they 
 should treat him thus; what the prince of Orange wanted, and 
 what those who were with the prince wanted. " A free par- 
 liament and the banishment of the papists," answered the 
 lords. James replied that he also desired a free parliament, 
 and that he would consent to banish the papists on certain 
 conditions. " Well," said the lords, "if such are your views, 
 doubtless they will satisfy the prince and his adherents; you 
 must communicate them to the prince." James exhibited 
 some reluctance to enter into an accommodation with William; 
 it would be recognising in him a right to interfere in the 
 affairs of the kingdom; but he was also obliged to acknow- 
 ledge the success, if not the legitimacy, of the enterprise. 
 Accordingly, a deputation, consisting of the marquis of Hali- 
 fax, the earl of Nottingham, and lord Godolphin, was charged 
 to wait upon William, and inform him that the king consented 
 to convoke a free parliament, and would arrange with him all 
 that might be deemed necessary to secure the freedom of the 
 elections. This was exactly as if James had said that he de- 
 sired to join the insurrection and to adopt the colours of 
 revolt: whereupon, those around the prince suggested to the 
 messengers, with an air of mockery, that beneath this question 
 of the convocation of a free parliament, a question already 
 settled, and therefore of pure form, there was another of a 
 more difficult nature — namely, from whom the nation should 
 hold the free parliament, from the prince of Orange, or from 
 the king. 
 
 The prince, however, replied as if he believed in the possi- 
 bility of an arrangement. His conditions, from their modéra - 
 
 T 2 
 
276 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1688. 
 
 tion, seemed devised not to take advantage of the situation of 
 James, which was then wholly desperate; for his second 
 daughter and the prince of Denmark had abandoned him, 
 and defection had become an ordinary and quite public jour- 
 ney from London to the prince's quarters; the council had 
 dispersed; and the queen had retired to France, taking with 
 her the prince of Wales. All at once James abandoned the 
 negotiation with the prince of Orange, and fled secretly in 
 the company of a nobleman, whose servant he passed for. 
 His destination was France, the last hope of the catholics; for 
 if they were without courage, they were not without projects. 
 
 Previous to his departure, James had given the earl of 
 Feversham orders to disband the troops w 7 hich he still kept 
 together in the environs of London. The order was partly 
 executed, so that the town was all at once filled with soldiers 
 without pay, whilst the people, on learning the flight of 
 James, broke out in their usual reckless manner, eager to be 
 revenged on the papists, and to manifest their joy at there 
 being no government. The catholic chapels were entirely 
 destroyed in a few hours; the convents were broken into; the 
 people not finding there the Jesuits w r hom they sought, went 
 after them into the houses of the papists, and even into the 
 mansions of the ambassadors of the catholic powers. No blood 
 was shed, because the Komish priests had fled several days 
 before, but all that they had left behind them, books, orna- 
 ments, and the objects of their worship, was seized and burnt. 
 In this first tumult, Jeffreys was recognised in a street dis- 
 guised as a sailor, and making towards the Thames, where a 
 vessel awaited him. Pie would have fallen a victim to the 
 popular fury had he not had the presence of mind to place 
 himself under the protection of some of the calmer people, 
 and to demand to be conducted to the Tower, where he 
 would reveal things of the greatest importance. The people 
 first beat him, and then dragged him before the lord mayor, 
 that he might oblige him to speak. The lord mayor, seeing in 
 this state, with torn clothes and face all bloody, a man whose 
 name only the evening before made every one tremble, 
 received such a shock that he died shortly after; Jeffreys, the 
 disgrace of the bench and of the peerage, died also in the 
 Tower from the excesses of w r ine in which he indulged, to calm 
 his remorse and terror. The troops, who, until the departure 
 of James, had kept the people in check, being now dispersed 
 
1689.] RETURN OF THE KING. 277 
 
 and disbanded, the disorder was perhaps less great than if it 
 had been opposed. Bnt all at once it was rumoured that the 
 disbanded Irish intended to set fire to the city. A procla- 
 mation, forged in the name of the prince of Orange, by an 
 unknown hand, and thrown into the midst of the assemblies, 
 created this alarming apprehension. The terror which it 
 caused gave reason to fear the greatest calamities; some of 
 the more furious of the populace already declared that the 
 papists must be exterminated to prevent their plottings. 
 
 jSTo one since the king's flight had as yet ventured to as- 
 sume the authority. The lord mayor, a man of little energy, 
 at last decided upon convoking at the Guildhall a meeting of 
 the privy council, and of the other bishops and lords who 
 were then in London. They agreed in this assembly that a 
 deputation should be sent to intreat the prince of Orange to 
 place himself at the head of the government until the convo- 
 cation of a free parliament, and, pending his answer, they called 
 out the city militia, and employed them to watch the dis- 
 banded soldiers, and to protect the catholics from the people. 
 Upon the invitation of the council, William advanced towards 
 London, but stopped at Windsor. The people, already dis- 
 satisfied with the measures taken by the council to restore 
 order, were angry that the prince should keep them waiting, 
 and perceived that his vicinity increased the strictness of the 
 magistrates. The same coolness -which the peasants and 
 poor country people had shown when they discovered that 
 this new revolution was not for them, was now felt by the Lon- 
 doners, and almost created an interest for the fugitive James» 
 They believed the latter to have already left the kingdom 
 several days, when a rumour came that he had been recognised 
 in a little port in Kent, had been prevented from embark- 
 ing, and was now on his way back to London. He imme- 
 diately afterwards entered London, free to all appearance, 
 and surrounded by his former guards, who had been sent to 
 meet him by the council. The people received him w r ith 
 acclamations, which however did not restore hope to him; 
 they seemed rather to prove that another was already master 
 in his stead, and was consequently already the object of 
 popular distrust. This return was both for him and for the 
 prince of Orange a kind of miscalculation; and he accord- 
 ingly resolved to fly once more, on the first opportunity, an 
 
278 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1689. 
 
 opportunity which the prince, who still feared his presence, 
 was very ready to afford him. 
 
 The prince of Orange first suggested to James to leave 
 London, on the pretext that he was no longer safe there. 
 James retired to Rochester, a town near the sea. The prince 
 then entered London, but privately, so that the people, in 
 default of the tumults, from which strict measures of police 
 precluded them, might not even have a show to occupy and 
 satisfy their curiosity. William, on arriving at St. James's 
 palace, found seventy peers assembled. He presented to 
 them his manifesto; invited them to arrange, without delay, 
 the means of convoking a free parliament, and withdrew, 
 without saying a word about James. The peers, imitating 
 his reserve, drew up a resolution, in which they engaged 
 themselves to William, as he had engaged himself to them 
 by his manifesto, not to abandon the cause of the protestant 
 religion and of the laws and liberties of England, " until 
 they were so secured by a free parliament, that they should 
 no longer have to fear falling again under the yoke of papacy 
 and slavery." This engagement of the seventy lords, and 
 the reception given by the common council to the prince, as 
 the friend of the national liberty and religion, was nothing 
 but the declaration of two assemblies without authority in 
 favour of the enterprise of the prince of Orange. There still 
 remained a very great constitutional difficulty; namely, who 
 was to convoke the parliament, the prince or the king. 
 
 The almost unanimous invocation of a free parliament had 
 been judiciously employed against James, when the chances of 
 the struggle might still have been in his favour, became 
 against the victorious William an equally prudent reserva- 
 tion. All those who, in England, comprehended the necessity 
 of saving liberty by preserving royalty; that is to say, the 
 aristocracy and the immense majority of the citizen class, 
 desired, until the nation was duly represented, to consider 
 William as the liberator and friend of the nation, but also 
 as unconcerned, personally, in the dispute between England 
 and her king. The legitimacy of the prince of Wales was not 
 brought into question. Upon this point the conviction which 
 had induced men to desire the intervention of William was 
 laid aside, until they had come to a determination respecting 
 James himself. 
 
1689.] THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT. 279 
 
 But meanwhile, James having fled a second time, the 
 alleged vacancy of the throne, a fact which was afterwards 
 matter of warm discussion, determined, as an extraordinary 
 circumstance, the assembly of lords to offer the prince the 
 provisional administration of the kingdom. William refused 
 to receive the authority from the lords alone; he required 
 that it should be offered him also by the common council, 
 representing the city of London, and by the members of the 
 two chambers of commons assembled under Charles IL, those 
 who had last represented England at Oxford, and whose 
 hatred to James, as shown in the bill of exclusion, was less 
 likely to change than that of many of the recently acceding 
 lords. 
 
 The former members of the commons assembled with those 
 of the common council, addressed to the prince an invitation 
 similar to that which he had received from the lords. They 
 added to it what the lords had omitted, their thanks- 
 givings to the liberator of England. The day after the pre- 
 sentation of this address, the lords and the gentlemen who 
 represented the commons received William's reply. Having 
 assembled them, he very briefly intimated to them " that he 
 would issue the writs of election, as they desired; that he 
 would employ, for the interest of the state, the power which 
 they confided to him; that if the religion and liberties of the 
 country w^ere, in fact, already indebted to him, he w r ould con- 
 tinue to merit the affection of the country, by his attachment 
 to these important interests." The elections immediately 
 commenced throughout the kingdom. It was perhaps the 
 first time they had been conducted with such freedom. Wil- 
 liam thought that, in his position, he ought not in any way 
 to influence them; and as none of the old parties were predo- 
 minant, all interests and all opinions were freely represented. 
 The two houses met on the 22nd of January, under the title 
 of Convention, as had been the case with the parliament for 
 the restoration. 
 
 And now was renewed on a larger scale the struggle of 
 interests, which had in Holland preceded William's embar- 
 kation. The relation between the forces of the two parties, 
 whom the drawing up of the manifesto had brought into con- 
 test, was no longer the same. There was also some difference 
 between the intentions with which they were animated, and 
 
280 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1689. 
 
 those which the refugee representatives heretofore had 
 manifested. The lords whose opinions prevailed in the com- 
 pilation of the manifesto, were now associated with an aristo- 
 cracy as hostile as themselves to popery, but more restrained 
 than they, from a fear of weakening the monarchical principle 
 in proceeding against James. Wildman and his friends had, 
 on the other hand, rather spoken the language of the repub- 
 lican party defeated at Oxford, than expressed the feelings of 
 the middle classes, with whom they were now mixed up, and 
 w r ho formed the new chamber. The new house of commons 
 was neither republican, presbyterian, nor Anglican; it was 
 the result of a twenty-eight years' progress, which the nation 
 had made despite the Stuarts and the Jesuits, since the pres- 
 byterian parliament which, in-order to overthrow the re- 
 public, had so imprudently called in the restoration. 
 
 Now the enlightened portion of the nation had learnt, 
 during these twenty-eight years of severe trials, that royalty 
 was necessary to a society divided into classes as is that 
 of England; that the principle of legitimacy alone was bad, 
 because it considered the national liberties as emanating from 
 and revocable at its will; that it was desirable for the 
 king for once to derive his right from the consent of the na- 
 tion, in order that those who succeeded him might not revive 
 the question of the nature of royal power, as had been the 
 case with all the kings since James I., and thus expose the 
 country to the danger of a revolution, on the one hand, or, 
 on the other, to that of losing its laws, its religion, its enlight- 
 enment, all which James II. judged incompatible with the 
 duty of passive obedience and non-resistance. 
 
 It was thus that the vast majority of the members of the 
 new house of commons regarded the question; it was com- 
 posed, indeed, of men who for a length of time, perhaps, had 
 fought as royalists or republicans, but they had now left be- 
 hind them abstract ideas, which are always dangerous, and 
 frankly entering upon matters of fact, were all agreed in 
 their views. Here ended the many exaggerations, which had 
 been corrected or punished the one by the other. After 
 a deliberation which lasted five hours, the two following de- 
 clarations were voted by the commons: — " That king James 
 the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of 
 the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king 
 
1689.] QUESTION AS TO JAMES'S SUCCESSOR. 281 
 
 and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked 
 persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having 
 withdrawn himself out of this kingdom, has abdicated the 
 government, and the throne is thereby vacant." " That it 
 has been found, by experience, inconsistent with the safety 
 and welfare of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a 
 popish prince." 
 
 These two declarations were immediately sent up to the 
 lords. They excited there a violent storm; but a calm fol- 
 lowed, and they were discussed in detail. The first question 
 debated w r as whether there was an original contract between 
 the people and the king. After a discussion, in which the 
 aristocratic terrors which had so long supported the tyranny 
 of James, still manifested themselves, the question was carried 
 by fifty-three to forty-six. The abdication and forfeiture of 
 James, by the violation of the popular liberties and his flight 
 from the kingdom, seemed naturally to follow from this first 
 proposition, as the fact of the vacancy of the throne from the 
 abdication of James; but a majority, an inconsiderable one 
 indeed, decided that James could not abdicate the govern- 
 ment; that he had only deserted the kingdom, and that thus 
 the throne was not vacant. 
 
 Those who had just admitted the doctrine of the original con- 
 tract, had resumed their fears of weakening the purity of the 
 monarchical principle, but this fear alone did not restrain them; 
 a motive, which they did not allege, was this: before declaring 
 that the throne was vacant, they wished to know who was to 
 fill it. The vacancy or non-vacancy of the throne was the 
 question between James and England; this was already 
 decided in every person's mind ; but the question between the 
 prince of Orange and the nation followed it so closely, and 
 still presented such serious difficulties in the opinion of 
 several members of the upper house, that to adjourn it, they 
 asserted, contrary to all reason, the non-vacancy of the throne. 
 Some among them wished to appoint a regent, others to pro- 
 claim the princess Mary and send back the prince; others to 
 give the crown to the prince only; the most general opinion, 
 that of the house of commons, w^as to give it to the 
 prince and princess together. They who desired a regency 
 or the princess Mary, did not venture to discuss their views 
 openly, but intrigued actively to insure their success. They 
 
282 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1689. 
 
 contrived that there should be another conference between 
 the two chambers on the question of the vacancy of the 
 throne; and this conference, notwithstanding its apparent 
 solemnity, served only to mask their intrigues and give them 
 time. It had, however, some importance, because to the ill 
 faith shown by the commissioners of the upper chamber, those 
 of the lower house opposed a remarkable superiority of intel- 
 lect and knowledge. But its inutility as to the question of 
 the vacancy of the throne, was proved by the facility with 
 which the commissioners of the upper chamber yielded to the 
 arguments of their adversaries, when the prince of Orange, 
 hitherto a silent spectator of this discussion, determined at 
 last to show the light in which he regarded it. 
 
 All had been astonished at the sort of contemptuous 
 patience with which William awaited from the convention 
 the reward of his services. Perhaps this man, who during 
 his whole life had had but one passion, the liberty of his 
 country, cared little for the demonstrations of patriotism of 
 noblemen, whose names were for the most part immediately 
 connected with some of the most disastrous epochs of the 
 reigns of Charles and James. He saw perfectly well that 
 several of them feared to have him for a master, and endea- 
 voured to have the preference given to the princess his wife. 
 He did not seek to conciliate them, well knowing that after 
 all, the English could not do without him; but he thought it 
 time to let them know his intentions, and accordingly summon- 
 ing the leading men amongst those whom he knew opposed him, 
 he told them, in his ordinary cold, dry, brief way: " You 
 have seen that I have sought to intimidate or flatter no one. 
 I hear talk of a regency; doubtless, a judicious plan, but do 
 not think of it for me; I would not accept the dignity. There 
 are some who propose to crown the princess; no one better 
 appreciates than I do her virtues and her rights; but I must 
 tell you that I am not a man to take orders from a cap, or to 
 hold the crown by an apron-string. I will undertake nothing 
 that is not left entirely to myself, and for my whole life. If 
 others think differently, let them make up their minds at once. 
 Royalty has little charm for me; and as soon as I shall find 
 that I am no longer useful to the English nation, I know 
 whither the affairs of Europe call me." 
 
 This declaration concurred with that which doctor Burnet 
 
1689.] THE CROWN OFFERED TO WILLIAM. 283 
 
 had obtained from the princess in Holland before the depar- 
 ture of the expedition, to determine the course of the conven- 
 tion, which had already declared the vacancy of the throne. 
 The lords, in whose presence William had affected such 
 disdain for royalty, saw that he was eager to settle the 
 matter, and that he was not a man who would submit to the 
 result he seemed to apprehend so little. They brought over 
 the other opposing lords to the opinion already prevalent in 
 the commons. The conference was completed, and the lords 
 adopted the resolution of the commons as to the vacancy of 
 the throne. 
 
 All things had been long before prepared to secure the 
 result of this declaration. The throne could not remain long 
 vacant: the will of the English nation was that it should be 
 filled, but on conditions which should guarantee the mainte- 
 nance of all acquired, that is to say, all known liberties. 
 Thus the first aim of the insurrection of 1640 was about to 
 be accomplished. The passions which had compromised and 
 outstepped that aim, ceased to exist on the day on which 
 parliament, the conqueror of absolute power, had been over- 
 thrown by a military dictator; and since that time the masses, 
 quitting the revolutionary struggle, had not ceased to progress 
 towards that reconcilement of interests which was to be 
 mutually proclaimed, unless they chose to be eternally at war. 
 This reconcilement had been sought in the restoration, but 
 not found, because too much had been granted to royal 
 power in re-establishing it. Twenty years of legal resistance, 
 under Charles IL, had sometimes given reason to believe that 
 men could with advantage struggle against these incon- 
 veniences; five years of an abominable tyranny under James 
 had destroyed this fallacy, and taught every one that they 
 must again modify royalty. This could be done with pru- 
 dence: the nearly equal misconduct of all parties, their com- 
 mon faults, their excesses imitated by each other, forbade 
 them to look back to the past, except to profit by the expe- 
 rience afforded by futile attempts, abrupt reactions, in- 
 justice punished, and finally, by the knowledge how long and 
 difficult a work it is to perfect institutions. The convention 
 rendered itself the oi'gan of this opinion of enlightened 
 England; it offered the crown to William and Mary; but in 
 order that royal power should undertake nothing against the 
 
284 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1689. 
 
 national laws, liberties, and religion, it made this declaration 
 of rights. 
 
 "1. That the pretended power of suspending laws or 
 execution of laws by regal authority, without consent of par- 
 liament, is illegal. 2. That the pretended power of dis- 
 pensing with laws, or the execution of laws, by regal autho- 
 rity, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal. 
 
 3. That the commission, for erecting the late Court of Com- 
 missioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commis- 
 sions and courts of the like nature, are illegal and pernicious. 
 
 4. That levying of money for or to the use of the crown, by 
 pretence of prerogative, without grant of parliament, for 
 longer time, or in any other manner than the same is or shall 
 be granted, is illegal. 5. That it is the right of the subject 
 to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions 
 for such petitionings are illegal. 6. That the raising or 
 keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of 
 peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against 
 law. 7. That the subjects which are protestants may have 
 arms for their defence, suitable to their condition, and as 
 allowed by law. 8. That elections of members of parlia- 
 ment ought to be free. 9. That the freedom of speech and 
 debates, or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be im- 
 peached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament. 
 
 10. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor exces- 
 sive fines imposed, nor cruel or unusual punishments inflicted. 
 
 11. That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, 
 and jurors which pass upon men in trials of high treason, 
 ought to be freeholders. 12. That all grants and promises of 
 fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction, 
 are illegal and void. 13. And that for redress of all griev- 
 ances, and for the amending, strengthening, and preserving 
 of the laws, parliament ought to be held frequently; and they 
 do claim, demand, and insist upon all and singular the pre- 
 mises, as their undoubted rights and privileges; and no 
 declarations, judgments, doings, or proceedings, to the preju- 
 dice of the people in any of the said premises, ought in any- 
 wise to be drawn hereafter into consequence or example." 
 
 This new declaration of rights was less energetic than 
 that of 1640; the latter had been made against royal power 
 as a manifesto of war; passion and inexperience gave their 
 
1689.] 
 
 A NEW OATH OF ALLEGIANCE. 
 
 285 
 
 principles its republican turn. The new declaration ad- 
 dressed to a power which men were about to establish, and 
 which inspired them with confidence, was a simple warning 
 given to it not to touch the liberties which the banished 
 family had attacked. 
 
 Immediately after voting this declaration, the two houses 
 solemnly resolved that the prince and princess of Orange 
 should be together named king and queen of England, and 
 that the administration of government should rest with the 
 king alone. A new form of oath was drawn up to replace 
 the former oaths of allegiance and supremacy: it was in these 
 terms: " I do sincerely promise and swear that I tvill be 
 faithful, and bear true allegiance to their majesties king Wil- 
 liam and queen Mary." The former oath was: " To the king, 
 my just and lawful sovereign" The words just and laivjul 
 were erased. The suppression was at once understood by the 
 country. In it w^as comprehended the entire thought of the 
 new revolution, as it was conceived by the majority of the 
 two chambers. The minority which had opposed the doc- 
 trine of the original contract, and which had dissented on the 
 question of the vacancy of the throne, from a remnant of 
 attachment to the Stuart family, adopted this suppression, but 
 solely because they regarded James as alone possessing 
 the right to this title oîjust and lawful sovereign. The ridi- 
 culous distinction between the king de facto, and the king de 
 jure, thus arose, and occasioned divisions which are beyond 
 the purpose of this history. 
 
 Thus terminated the English counter-revolution. The 
 middle classes, in the interests of their property, commenced 
 it, by preferring the military despotism of Cromwell to a reform 
 which promised to the inferior classes a community of pro- 
 perty. In the interest of order and repose, they continued 
 it against the army when the death of Cromwell had replaced 
 it in its condition as a republican party ; and then, to 
 conquer the army, they recalled and placed above it the 
 higher classes and royalty. The passion-led reaction, which 
 called in the Stuarts, and courted them as ministers of ven- 
 geance against the levellers, the republicans, the fanatics, and 
 the old adherents of the protectorate, ended when these were 
 no longer to be feared. The Stuarts were terrified when 
 all around them grew tranquil. The Anglicans, after having 
 
286 HISTORY OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. [1689. 
 
 sacrificed the presbyterians to them, still appeared dangerous ; 
 the parliament, after having killed the regicides, still gave 
 them umbrage. They could not forget that the Anglican 
 protestants, in combating popery, and the parliament in 
 opposing absolute power, had begun the revolution. Now 
 among the principles proclaimed by the revolution, it was 
 necessary to distinguish those for which it had undertaken 
 to create facts, and those which were only the expression of 
 facts older than itself. The nation had rejected the former, 
 the second were those which Charles I. had refused to reco- 
 gnise. In order to escape their father's fate, Charles II. and 
 James II. resolved to be more daring than he, to destroy 
 that which he had merely rejected. Yielding to the dictates 
 of this insane project, they became reformers in their own 
 way, and thus continued the state of warfare which the 
 nation had wished to escape in recalling them. Resistance, 
 provoked by that which they did to avoid it, augmented their 
 alarm at every step, and impelled them onwards in their 
 work of destruction until the discontent of the nation once 
 more became anger. It was then necessary to oppose passion 
 to passion, to return hate for hate; and it was especially James 
 who urged arbitrary counsels and efforts, because in him the 
 sense of danger was stronger, and because he detested liberty 
 as the puritan visionaries had detested royal power. The 
 light of reason which at times caused Charles to mourn over 
 the inevitable descent, no longer shone over a throne, already 
 utterly compromised, when James brought to it his passions 
 and weak intellect. The double direction given to the go- 
 vernment under Charles II. ceased, and it was the occult 
 direction, defeated by the formidable imposture of Oates and 
 restored by the Rye House plot, which for a while prevailed. 
 The Jesuits were called in to destroy that which by a ridiculous 
 abstraction of ideas they and a few obstinate absolutists per- 
 sisted in calling the revolution, thirty years after the facile 
 usurpation of Cromwell. They led James precisely by that 
 in which Charles II. was wanting, the conscience. They 
 made full use of their casuistical powder over a credulous 
 mind, whose inclinations were all revengeful and bloodthirsty; 
 they relieved him from the remorse w r hich they did not feel 
 themselves. They spared neither fraud, nor violence, nor 
 crime to insure success; nor were they deficient in ability: 
 
1689.] conclusion. 287 
 
 they displayed it in the skilful combination of their intrigues 
 and attempts. After having spread so general a terror, that 
 no one dared attempt any other protest than what might pro- 
 ceed from free elections, they governed without parliaments. 
 They took from the towns their charters, from the corpora- 
 tions their electoral privileges, in order that the impossibility 
 of naming worthy representatives might induce them to re- 
 nounce the desire of being represented. In order to mould 
 future governments to the yoke, they invaded the public edu- 
 cational establishments. To deprive the nation of the right 
 of examination in matters of government, it only remained 
 for them to extirpate from the kingdom that religion which 
 had heretofore taught the people to judge their kings; they 
 did not attack it in all its sects, but only in that which was 
 predominant, and thus gained over the rest as allies. It was an 
 astonishing spectacle, that extreme party in the counter-revo- 
 lution calling to its aid, in the name of religious toleration, 
 all that remained of the extreme revolutionists; but this alli- 
 ance, solicited by a government which lived from day to day, 
 could not last; it terminated with the intention manifested by 
 the Jesuits of giving to the crown a successor brought up in 
 catholic intolerance. Finally, when William offered himself 
 to the nation as a liberator, the futility of all these enterprises 
 became matter of contemptuous pity; the nation had never 
 ceased to cherish its political liberties and its religious 
 guarantees; they existed in things, in manners, in the affec- 
 tions, at a time when they were nominally destroyed; while 
 of that absolute power, that foreign religion, which had been 
 introduced with such labour, nothing remained. James built 
 a few chapels, had exhibited the catholic surplice to the people 
 of London, had had the satisfaction of publicly attending 
 mass; and whilst he crossed the sea, a fugitive, a free parlia- 
 ment, as a lesson for the future, was inscribing in the records 
 of England, this memorable vote — " James IL, king of Eng- 
 land by violating, by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked 
 persons, the fundamental laws, has abdicated the govern 
 ment." 
 

 A HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE EARLY PAET OF THE REIGN 
 
 JAMES THE SECOND: 
 
 WITH 
 
 &n tutnrtfuctorg Chapter. 
 
 RT. HON. CHARLES JAMES FOX. 
 
A HISTORY 
 
 THE EARLY PART OF THE REIGN 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES THE SECOND. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Introductory observations — First period, from Henry VII. to the year 1588 
 — Second period, from 1588 to 1640 — Meeting of Parliament — Eedress 
 of grievances — Strafford's attainder — The commencement of the civil war 
 — Treaty from the Isle of Wight — The king's execution — Cromwell's 
 power; his character — Indifference of the nation respecting forms of 
 government — The restoration — Ministry of Clarendon and Southampton 
 — Cabal — Dutch war — De Witt — The Prince of Orange — The Popish 
 plot — The Habeas Corpus Act — The Exclusion Bill— Dissolution of 
 Charles the Second's last parliament — His power; his tyranny in Scot- 
 land ; in England — Exorbitant fines — Executions — Forfeitures of char- 
 ters — Despotism established — Despondency of good men — Charles's 
 death; his character — Reflections upon the probable consequences of 
 his reign and death. 
 
 In reading the history of every country, there are certain 
 periods at which the mind naturally pauses to meditate upon, 
 and consider them, with reference, not only to their imme- 
 diate effects, but to their more remote consequences. After 
 the wars of Marius and Sylla, and the incorporation, as it 
 were, of all Italy with the city of Rome, we cannot but stop 
 to consider the consequences likely to result from these 
 important events; and in this instance we find them to be 
 just such as might have been expected. 
 
 u2 
 
292 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1588- 
 
 The reign of our Henry VII. affords a field of more 
 doubtful speculation. Every one who takes a retrospective 
 view of the wars of York and Lancaster, and attends to the 
 regulations effected by the policy of that prince, must see they 
 would necessarily lead to great and important changes in the 
 government; but what the tendency of such changes would 
 be, and much more, in what manner they would be produced, 
 might be a question of great difficulty. It is now the gene- 
 rally received opinion, and I think a probable opinion, that 
 to the provisions of that reign we are to refer the origin, both 
 of the unlimited power of the Tudors, and of the liberties 
 wrested by our ancestors from the Stuarts; that tyranny was 
 their immediate, and liberty their remote, consequence; but 
 he must have great confidence in his own sagacity, who can 
 satisfy himself that, unaided by the knowledge of subsequent 
 events, he could, from a consideration of the causes, have 
 foreseen the succession of effects so different. 
 
 Another period, that affords ample scope for speculation of 
 this kind, is that which is comprised between the years 
 1588 and 1640, a period of almost uninterrupted tranquillity 
 and peace. The general improvement in all arts of civil life, 
 and above all, the astonishing progress of literature, are the 
 most striking among the general features of that period, and 
 are in themselves causes sufficient to produce effects of the 
 utmost importance. A country whose language was enriched 
 by the works of Hooker, Raleigh, and Bacon, could not but 
 experience a sensible change in its manners, and in its style 
 of thinking; and even to speak the same language in which 
 Spenser and Shakspere had written, seemed a sufficient 
 plea to rescue the commons of England from the appella- 
 tion of brutes, with which Henry VIII. had addressed them. 
 Among the more particular effects of this general improve- 
 ment, the most material and worthy to be considered appear 
 to me to have been the frequency of debate in the house of 
 commons, and the additional value that came to be set on a 
 seat in that assembly. 
 
 From these circumstances a sagacious observer may be led 
 to expect the most important revolutions; and from the latter, 
 he may be enabled to foresee that the house of commons will 
 be the principal instrument in bringing them to pass. But 
 in what manner will that house conduct itself? Will it con- 
 
1640.] 
 
 PROGRESS OF THE COMMONS. 
 
 293 
 
 tent itself with its regular share of legislative power, and 
 with the influence which it cannot fail to possess, whenever 
 it exerts itself upon the other branches of the legislative, and 
 on the executive power? or will it boldly (perhaps rashly) 
 pretend to a power commensurate with the natural rights of 
 the representative of the people? If it should, will it not be 
 obliged to support its claims by military force? and how long 
 will such a force be under its control? how long before it 
 follows the usual course of all armies, and ranges itself under a 
 single master? If such a master should arise, will he establish 
 an hereditary or an elective government? if the first, what 
 will be gained but a change of dynasty? If the second, will 
 not the military force, as it chose the first king or protector, 
 (the name is of no importance,) choose in effect all his suc- 
 cessors? Or will he fail, and shall we have a restoration, 
 usually the most dangerous and worst of all revolutions? To 
 some of these questions the answers may, from the experi- 
 ence of past ages, be easy, but to many of them far other- 
 wise. And he will read history with most profit who the 
 most canvasses questions of this nature, especially if he can 
 divest his mind, for the time, of the recollection of the event 
 as it in fact succeeded. 
 
 The next period, as it is that which immediately precedes 
 the commencement of this history, requires a more detailed 
 examination; nor is there any more fertile of matter, whether 
 for reflection or speculation. Between the year 1640 and 
 the death of Charles IL, we have the opportunity of con- 
 templating the state in almost every variety of circumstance. 
 Religious dispute, political contest in all its forms and de- 
 grees, from the honest exertions of party and the corrupt in- 
 trigues of faction, to violence and civil war; despotism, first 
 in the" person of an usurper, and afterwards in that of an 
 hereditary king; the most memorable and salutary improve- 
 ments in the laws, the most abandoned administration of 
 them; in fine, whatever can happen to a nation, whether of 
 glorious or calamitous, makes a part of this astonishing and 
 instructive picture. 
 
 The commencement of this period is marked by exertions 
 of the people, through their representatives in the house of 
 commons, not only justifiable in their principle, but directed 
 to the properest objects, and in a manner the most judicious» 
 
294 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1640. 
 
 Many of their leaders were greatly versed in ancient as well 
 as modern learning, and were even enthusiastically attached 
 to the great names of antiquity; but they never conceived 
 the wild project of assimilating the government of England to 
 that of Athens, of Sparta, or of Rome. They were content 
 with applying to the English constitution, and to the English 
 laws, the spirit of liberty which had animated and rendered 
 illustrious the ancient republics. Their first object was to 
 obtain redress of past grievances with a proper regard to the 
 individuals who had suffered; the next, to prevent the re- 
 currence of such grievances, by the abolition of tyrannical 
 tribunals acting upon arbitrary maxims in criminal proceed- 
 ings, and most improperly denominated courts of justice. 
 They then proceeded to establish that fundamental principle 
 of all free government, the preserving of the purse to the 
 people and their representatives. And though there may be 
 more difference of opinion upon their proposed regulations in 
 regard to the militia, yet surely, when a contest was to be 
 foreseen, they could not, consistently with prudence, leave 
 the power of the sword altogether in the hands of an adverse 
 party. 
 
 The prosecution of Lord Strafford, or rather, the manner 
 in which it was carried on, is less justifiable. He was doubt- 
 less a great delinquent, and well deserved the severest punish- 
 ment; but nothing short of a clearly proved case of self- 
 defence can justify, or even excuse, a departure from the 
 sacred rules of criminal justice. For it can rarely indeed 
 happen, that the mischief to be apprehended from suffering 
 any criminal, however guilty, to escape, can be equal to that 
 resulting from the violation of those rules to which the inno- 
 cent owe the security of all that is dear to them. If such 
 cases have existed, they must have been in instances where 
 trial has been wholly out of the question, as in that of Caesar, 
 and other tyrants; but when a man is once in a situation to 
 be tried, and his person in the power of his accusers and his 
 judges, he can no longer be formidable in that degree which 
 alone can justify (if anything can) the violation of the sub- 
 stantial rules of criminal proceedings. 
 
 At the breaking out of the civil war, so intemperately de- 
 nominated a rebellion by lord Clarendon and other tory 
 writers, the material question appears to me to be, whether or 
 
1640.] 
 
 COMMENCEMENT OF THE CIVIL WAR. 
 
 29o 
 
 not sufficient attempts were made by the parliament and then- 
 leaders, to avoid bringing affairs to such a decision? That, 
 according to the general principles of morality, they had 
 justice on their side, cannot fairly be doubted; but did they 
 sufficiently attend to that great dictum of Tully, 1 in questions 
 of civil dissension, wherein he declares his preference of even 
 an unfair peace to the most just war? Did they sufficiently 
 weigh the dangers that might ensue even from victory; dan- 
 gers, in such eases, little less formidable to the cause of liberty 
 than those which might follow a defeat? Did they consider 
 that it is not peculiar to the followers of Pompey, and the 
 civil wars of Rome, that the event to be looked for is, as the 
 same Tully describes it, in case of defeat — proscription; in 
 that of victory — servitude? Is the failure of the negotiation 
 when the king was in the Isle of Wight to be imputed to the 
 suspicions justly entertained of his sincerity? or to the ambi- 
 tion of the parliamentary leaders? If the insincerity of the 
 king was the real cause, ought not the mischief to be appre- 
 hended from his insincerity, rather to have been guarded 
 against by treaty, than alleged as a pretence for breaking off 
 the negotiation? Sad, indeed, will be the condition of the 
 world, if we are never to make peace with an adverse party 
 whose sincerity we have reason to suspect. Even just grounds 
 for such suspicions will but too often occur, and when such 
 fail, the proneness of man to impute evil qualities as well as 
 evil designs to his enemies, will suggest false ones. In the 
 present case, the suspicion of insincerity was, it is true, so 
 just, as to amount to a moral certainty. The example of the 
 petition of right was a satisfactory proof that the king made 
 no point of adhering to concessions which he considered as 
 extorted from him; and if a philosophical historian, writing 
 above a century after the time, can deem the pretended hard 
 usage Charles met with as a sufficient excuse for his breaking 
 his faith in the first instance, much more must that prince 
 himself, with all his prejudices and notions of his divine 
 right, have thought it justifiable to retract concessions, which 
 to him, no doubt, appeared far more unreasonable than the 
 petition of right, and which, with much more colour, he 
 might consider as extorted. These considerations were pro- 
 
 Jinquissimam paceni justissimo bello antefero. 
 
296 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1640. 
 
 bably the cause why the parliament so long delayed their 
 determination of accepting the king's offer as a basis for 
 treaty; but, unfortunately, they had delayed so long, that 
 when at last they adopted it, they found themselves without 
 power to carry it into execution. The army having now 
 ceased to be the servants, had become the masters, of the 
 parliament, and being entirely influenced by Cromwell, gave 
 a commencement to what may, properly speaking, be called 
 a new reign. The subsequent measures, therefore, the execu- 
 tion of the king, as well as others, are not to be considered 
 as acts of the parliament, but of Cromwell; and great and 
 respectable as are the names of some who sat in the high 
 court, they must be regarded, in this instance, rather as 
 ministers of that usurper, than as acting from themselves. 
 
 The execution of the king, though a far less violent mea- 
 sure than that of lord Strafford, is an event of so singular a 
 nature, that we cannot wonder that it should have excited 
 more sensation than any other in the annals of England. 
 This exemplary act of substantial justice, as it has been called 
 by some, of enormous wickedness, by others, must be consi- 
 dered in two points of view. First, was it not in itself just 
 and necessary? Secondly, was the example of it likely to be 
 salutary or pernicious? In regard to the first of these ques- 
 tions, Mr. Hume, not perhaps intentionally, makes the best 
 justification of it, by saying, that while Charles lived, the 
 projected republic could never be secure. But to justify 
 taking away the life of an individual, upon the principle of 
 self-defence, the danger must be, not problematical and 
 remote, but evident and immediate. The danger in this 
 instance was not of such a nature; and the imprisonment, or 
 even banishment, of Charles, might have given to the republic 
 such a degree of security as any government ought to be con- 
 tent with. It must be confessed, however, on the other side, 
 that if the republican government had suffered the king to 
 escape, it would have been an act of justice and generosity 
 wholly unexampled; and to have granted him even his life, 
 would have been one among the more rare efforts of virtue. 
 The short interval between the déposai and death of princes 
 is become proverbial; and though there may be some few 
 examples on the other side, as far as life is concerned, I doubt 
 whether a single instance can be found, where liberty has 
 
1640.] INQUIRY INTO THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I. 297 
 
 been granted to a deposed monarch. Among the modes of 
 destroying persons in such a situation, there can be little 
 doubt but that that adopted by Cromwell and his adherents is 
 the least dishonourable. Edward II., Richard II., Henry VI., 
 Edward V., had none of them long survived their déposai; 
 but this was the first instance, in our history at least, where, 
 of such an act, it could be truly said that it was not done in 
 a corner. 
 
 As to the second question, whether the advantage to be 
 derived from the example was such as to justify an act of 
 such violence, it appears to me to be a complete solution of 
 it to observe, that with respect to England, (and I know not 
 upon what ground we are to set examples for other nations, 
 or, in other words, to take the criminal justice of the world 
 into our hands,) it was wholly needless, and therefore unjusti- 
 fiable, to set one for kings, at a time when it was intended 
 the office of king should be abolished, and consequently, that 
 no person should be in the situation to make it the rule of his 
 conduct. Besides, the miseries attendant upon a deposed 
 monarch seem to be sufficient to deter any prince, who thinks 
 of consequences, from running the risk of being placed in 
 such a situation; or, if death be the only evil that can deter 
 him, the fate of former tyrants deposed by their subjects, 
 would by no means encourage him to hope he could avoid 
 even that catastrophe. As far as we can judge from the 
 event, the example was certainly not very effectual, since 
 both the sons of Charles, though having their father's fate 
 before their eyes, yet feared not to violate the liberties of the 
 people even more than he had attempted to do. 
 
 If we consider this question of example in a more extended 
 view, and look to the general effect produced upon the minds 
 of men, it cannot be doubted but the opportunity thus given 
 to Charles, to display his firmness and piety, has created more 
 respect for his memory than it could otherwise have obtained. 
 Respect and pity for the sufferer, on the one hand, and hatred 
 to his enemies, on the other, soon produce favour and aversion 
 to their respective causes ; and thus, even though it should be 
 admitted (which is doubtful) that some advantage may have 
 been gained to the cause of liberty by the terror of the ex- 
 ample operating upon the minds of princes, such advantage 
 is far outweighed by the zeal which admiration for virtue, 
 
298 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 [1640. 
 
 and pity for sufferings, the best passions of the human heart, 
 have excited in favour of the royal cause. It has been 
 thought dangerous to the morals of mankind, even in fiction 
 and romance, to make us sympathize with characters whose 
 general conduct is blameable; but how much greater must 
 the effect be, when in real history our feelings are interested 
 in favour of a monarch with whom, to say the least, his sub- 
 jects were obliged to contend in arms for their liberty? After 
 all, however, notwithstanding what the more reasonable part 
 of mankind may think upon this question, it is much to be 
 doubted whether this singular proceeding has not, as much 
 as any other circumstance, served to raise the character of 
 the English nation in the opinion of Europe in general. He 
 who has read, and still more, he who has heard in conversa- 
 tion, discussions upon this subject by foreigners, must have 
 perceived, that, even in the minds of those who condemn the 
 act, the impression made by it has been far more that of 
 respect and admiration, than that of disgust and horror. The 
 truth is, that the guilt of the action, that is to say, the taking 
 away of the life of the king, is what most men in the place 
 of Cromwell and his associates would have incurred; what 
 there is of splendour and of magnanimity in it, I mean the 
 publicity and' solemnity of the act, is what few would be 
 capable of displaying. It is a degrading fact to human 
 nature, that even the sending away of the duke of Gloucester 
 was an instance of generosity almost unexampled in the his- 
 tory of transactions of this nature. 
 
 From the execution of the king to the death of Cromwell, 
 the government was, with some variation of forms, in sub- 
 stance monarchical and absolute, as a government established 
 by a military force will almost invariably be, especially when 
 the exertions of such a force are continued for any length of 
 time. If to this general rule our own age, and a people whom 
 their origin and near relation to us would almost warrant us 
 to call our own nation, have afforded a splendid and perhaps 
 a solitary exception, we must reflect, not only that a character 
 of virtues so happily tempered by one another, and so wholly 
 unalloyed with any vices, as that of Washington, is hardly to 
 be found in the pages of history, but that even Washington 
 himself might not have been able to act his most glorious of 
 all parts without the existence of circumstances uncommonly 
 
1640.] 
 
 CHARACTER OF CROMWELL. 
 
 299 
 
 favourable, and almost peculiar to the country which was to 
 be the theatre of it. Virtue like his depends not indeed upon 
 time or place; but although in no country or time would he 
 have degraded himself into a Pisistratus, or a Caesar, or a 
 Cromwell, he might have shared the fate of a Cato, or a De 
 Witt; or, like Ludlow and Sidney, have mourned in exile 
 the lost liberties of his country. 
 
 With the life of the protector almost immediately ended the 
 government which he had established. The great talents of 
 this extraordinary person had supported, during his life, a 
 system condemned equally by reason and by prejudice; by 
 reason, as wanting freedom; by prejudice, as an usurpation; 
 and it must be confessed to be no mean testimony to his 
 genius, that, notwithstanding the radical defects of such a 
 system, the splendour of his character and exploits render the 
 era of the protectorship one of the most brilliant in English 
 history. It is true his conduct in foreign concerns is set off 
 to advantage by a comparison of it with that of those who 
 preceded, and who followed him, If he made a mistake in 
 espousing the French interest instead of the Spanish, we 
 should recollect that in examining this question we must 
 divest our minds entirely of all the considerations which the 
 subsequent relative state of those two empires suggest to us, 
 before we can become impartial judges in it; and at any rate 
 we must allow his reign, in regard to European concerns, to 
 have been most glorious when contrasted with the pusilla- 
 nimity of James I., with the levity of Charles I., and the 
 mercenary meanness of the two last princes of the house of 
 Stuart. Upon the whole, the character of Cromwell must 
 ever stand high in the list of those who raised themselves to 
 supreme power by the force of their genius; and among such, 
 even in respect of moral virtue, it would be found to be one 
 of the least exceptionable, if it had not been tainted with 
 that most odious and degrading of all human vices, hypo- 
 crisy. 
 
 The short interval between Cromwell's death and the 
 restoration exhibits the picture of a nation either so wearied 
 with changes as not to feel, or so subdued by military power 
 as not to dare to show, any care or even preference with 
 regard to the form of their government. All was in the 
 army; and that army, by such a concurrence of fortuitous 
 
300 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1640- 
 
 circumstances as history teaches us not to be surprised at, had 
 fallen into the hands of a man, than whom a baser could not 
 be found in its lowest ranks. Personal courage appears to have 
 been Monk's only virtue; reserve and dissimulation made up 
 the whole stock of his wisdom. But to this man did the 
 nation look up, ready to receive from his orders the form of 
 government he should choose to prescribe. There is reason 
 to believe that, from the general bias of the presbyterians, as 
 well as of the cavaliers, monarchy was the prevalent wish; 
 but it is observable, that although the parliament was, con- 
 trary to the principle upon which it was pretended to be 
 called, composed of many avowed royalists, yet none dared 
 to hint at the restoration of the king, till they had Monk's 
 permission, or rather command, to receive and consider his 
 letters. It is impossible, in reviewing the whole of this 
 transaction, not to remark that a general who had gained his 
 rank, reputation, and station, in the service of a republic, and 
 of what he, as well as others, called, however falsely, the 
 cause of liberty, made no scruple to lay the nation prostrate 
 at the feet of a monarch, without a single provision in favour 
 of that cause; and if the promise of indemnity may seem to 
 argue that there was some attention, at least, paid to the 
 safety of his associates in arms, his subsequent conduct 
 gives reason to suppose that even this provision was owing 
 to any other cause, rather than to a generous feeling of 
 his breast. For he afterwards not only acquiesced in the 
 insults so meanly put upon the illustrious corpse of Blake, 
 under whose auspices and command he had performed the 
 most creditable services of his life, but in the trial of Argyle, 
 produced letters of friendship and confidence to take away 
 the life of a nobleman, 1 the zeal and cordiality of whose co- 
 operation with him, proved by such documents, was the 
 chief ground of his execution; thus gratuitously surpassing 
 in infamy those miserable wretches who, to save their own 
 lives, are sometimes persuaded to impeach and swear away 
 the lives of their accomplices. 
 
 The reign of Charles II. forms one of the most singular 
 as well as of the most important periods of history. It is 
 the era of good laws and bad government.' The abolition of 
 
 1 Burnet. Baillie's Letters, ii. 431. 
 
1660.] ADMINISTRATION OF CLARENDON. 301 
 
 the court of wards, the repeal of the writ De Heretico Com- 
 burendo, the triennial parliament bill, the establishment of 
 the rights of the house of commons in regard to impeachment, 
 the expiration of the licence act, and above all, the glorious 
 statute of Habeas Corpus, have therefore induced a modern 
 writer of great eminence to fix the year 1679 as the period 
 at which our constitution had arrived at its greatest theo- 
 retical perfection; but he owns, in a short note upon the 
 passage alluded to, that the times immediately following were 
 times of great practical oppression. What a field for medi- 
 tation does this short observation from such a man furnish! 
 What reflections does it not suggest to a thinking mind upon 
 the ineflicacy of human laws, and the imperfection of human 
 constitutions! We are called from the contemplation of the 
 progress of our constitution, and our attention fixed with the 
 most minute accuracy to a particular point, when it is said to 
 have risen to its utmost perfection. Here we are, then, at the 
 best moment of the best constitution that ever human wisdom 
 framed. What follows? A time of oppression and misery, 
 not arising from external or accidental causes, such as war, 
 pestilence, or famine, nor even from any such alteration of 
 the laws as might be supposed to impair this boasted perfec- 
 tion, but from a corrupt and wicked administration, which 
 all the so much admired checks of the constitution were not 
 able to prevent. How vain, then, how idle, how presump- 
 tuous, is the opinion that laws can do everything! and how 
 weak and pernicious the maxim founded upon it, that mea- 
 sures, not men, are to be attended to. 
 
 The first years of this reign, under the administration of 
 Southampton and Clarendon, form by far the least excep- 
 tionable part of it; and even in this period, the executions of 
 Argyle and Vane, and the whole conduct of the government 
 with respect to church matters, both in England and in Scot- 
 land, were gross instances of tyranny. With respect to the 
 execution of those who were accused of having been more im- 
 mediately concerned in the king's death, that of Scrope, who 
 had come in upon the proclamation, and of the military officers 
 who had attended the trial, was a violation of every principle 
 of law and justice. But the fate of the others, though highly 
 dishonourable to Monk, whose whole power had arisen from 
 his zeal in their service, and the favour and confidence with 
 
302 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1640- 
 
 which they had rewarded him, and not, perhaps, very credit- 
 able to the nation, of which many had applauded, more had 
 supported, and almost all had acquiesced in the act, is not 
 certainly to be imputed as a crime to the king, or to those of 
 his advisers who were of the cavalier party. The passion of 
 revenge, though properly condemned both by philosophy and 
 religion, yet when it is excited by injurious treatment of per- 
 sons justly dear to us, is among the most excusable of human 
 frailties; and if Charles, in his general conduct, had shown 
 stronger feelings of gratitude for services performed to his 
 father, his character, in the eyes of many, would be rather 
 raised than lowered by this example of severity against the 
 regicides. Clarendon is said to have been privy to the king's 
 receiving money from Louis XIV.; but what proofs exist 
 of this charge (for a heavy charge it is) I know not. South- 
 ampton was one of the very few of the royalist party who 
 preserved any just regard for the liberties of the people; and 
 the disgust which a person possessed of such sentiments must 
 unavoidably feel, is said to have determined him to quit the 
 king's service, and to retire altogether from public affairs. 
 "Whether he would have acted upon this determination, his 
 death, which happened in the year 1667, prevents us now 
 from ascertaining. 
 
 After the fall of Clarendon, which soon followed, the king 
 entered into that career of misgovernment, which, that he was 
 able to pursue it to its end, is a disgrace to the history of our 
 country. If anything can add to our disgust at the meanness 
 with which he solicited a dependence upon Louis XIV., it is, 
 the hypocritical pretence upon which he was continually 
 pressing that monarch. After having passed a law, making 
 it penal to affirm (what was true) that he was a papist, he 
 pretended (which was certainly not true) to be a zealous and 
 bigoted papist; and the uneasiness of his conscience at so long 
 delaying a public avowal of his conversion, was more than 
 once urged by him as an argument to increase the pension, 
 and to accelerate the assistance, he was to receive from 
 France. 1 In a later period of his reign, when his interest, as 
 he thought, lay the other way, that he might at once continue 
 to earn his wages, and yet put off a public conversion, he 
 
 1 Dalrymple's Memoirs, ii. 33, &c. 
 
1670.] 
 
 THE BUTCH WARS. 
 
 303 
 
 stated some scruples, contracted, no doubt, by his affection to 
 the protestant churches, in relation to the popish mode of 
 giving the sacrament, and pretended a wish that the pope 
 might be induced by Louis to consider of some alterations in 
 that respect, to enable him to reconcile himself to the Eoman 
 church with a clear and pure conscience. 1 
 
 The ministry, known by the name of the Cabal, seems to 
 have consisted of characters so unprincipled, as justly to de- 
 serve the severity with which they have been treated by all 
 writers who have mentioned them; but if it is probable that 
 they were ready to betray their king as well as their country, 
 it is certain that the king betrayed them, keeping from them 
 the real state of his connexion with France, and from some of 
 them, at least, the secret of what he was pleased to call his 
 religion. Whether this concealment on his part arose from 
 his habitual treachery, and from the incapacity which men of 
 that character feel of being open and honest, even when they 
 know it is their interest to be so, or from an apprehension 
 that they might demand for themselves some share of the 
 French money, which he was unwilling to give them, cannot 
 now be determined. But to the want of genuine and reci- 
 procal confidence between him and those ministers is to be 
 attributed, in a great measure, the escape which the nation at 
 that time experienced — an escape, however, which proved to 
 be only a reprieve from that servitude to which they were 
 afterwards reduced in the latter years of the reign. 
 
 The first Dutch war had been undertaken against all maxims 
 of policy as well as of justice; but the superior infamy of the 
 second, aggravated by the disappointment of all the hopes en- 
 tertained by good men from the triple alliance, and by the 
 treacherous attempt at piracy with which it was commenced, 
 seems to have effaced the impression of it, not only from the 
 minds of men living at the time, but from most of the writers 
 who have treated of this reign. The principle, however, of 
 both, was the same, and arbitrary power at home was the 
 object of both. The second Dutch war rendered the king's 
 system and views so apparent to all who were not determined 
 to shut their eyes against conviction, that it is difficult to 
 conceive how persons, who had any real care or regard, either 
 
 Dalrymples Memoirs, ii. S4. 
 
304 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER, [1672. 
 
 for the liberty or honour of the country, could trust him after- 
 wards. And yet even sir William Temple, who appears to 
 have been one of the most honest, as well as of the most en- 
 lightened, statesmen of his time, could not believe his treachery 
 to be quite so deep as it was in fact, and seems occasionally to 
 have hoped that he was in earnest in his professed intentions 
 of following the wise and just system that was recommended 
 to him. Great instances of credulity and blindness in wise 
 men are often liable to the suspicion of being pretended, for 
 the purpose of justifying the continuing in situations of 
 power and employment longer than strict honour would 
 allow. But to Temple's sincerity his subsequent conduct 
 gives abundant testimony. When he had reason to think 
 that his services could no longer be useful to his country, he 
 withdrew wholly from public business, and resolutely adhered 
 to the preference of philosophical retirement, which, in his 
 circumstances, was just, in spite of every temptation which 
 occurred to bring him back to the more active scene. The 
 remainder of his life he seems to have employed in the most 
 noble contemplations, and the most elegant amusements; every 
 enjoyment heightened, no doubt, by reflecting on the honour- 
 able part he had acted in public affairs, and without any re- 
 gret on his own account (whatever he might feel for his 
 country) at having been driven from them. 
 
 Besides the important consequences produced by this second 
 Dutch war in England, it gave birth to two great events in 
 Holland; the one as favourable as the other was disastrous to 
 the cause of general liberty. The catastrophe of De Witt, 
 the wisest, best, and most truly patriotic minister that ever 
 appeared upon the public stage, as it was an act of the most 
 crying injustice and ingratitude, so, likewise, is it the most 
 completely discouraging example that history affords to the 
 lovers of liberty. If Aristides was banished, he was also 
 recalled; if Dion was repaid for his services to the Syracusans 
 by ingratitude, that ingratitude w^as more than once repented 
 of; if Sidney and Russell died upon the scaffold, they had not 
 the cruel mortification of falling by the hands of the people; 
 ample justice was done to their memory, and the very sound 
 of their names is stili^animating to every Englishman attached 
 to their glorious cause. But with De Witt fell also his cause 
 and his party; and although a name so respected by all who 
 
1672.] 
 
 THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. 
 
 305 
 
 revere virtue and wisdom, when employed in their noblest 
 sphere, the political service of the public, must undoubtedly 
 be doubly dear to his countrymen, yet I do not know that, 
 even to this day, any public honours have been paid by them 
 to his memory. 
 
 On the other hand, the circumstances attending the first 
 appearance of the prince of Orange in public affairs, were, in 
 every respect, most fortunate for himself, for England, for 
 Europe. Of an age to receive the strongest impressions, and of 
 a character to render such impressions durable, he entered the 
 world in a moment when the calamitous situation of the United 
 Provinces could not but excite in every Dutchman the strongest 
 detestation of the insolent ambition of Louis XIV., and the 
 greatest contempt of an English government, which could so 
 far mistake or betray the interests of the country as to lend 
 itself to his projects. Accordingly, the circumstances attending 
 his outset seem to have given a lasting bias to his character; and 
 through the whole course of his life, the prevailing sentiments 
 of his mind seem to have been those which he imbibed at this 
 early period. These sentiments were most peculiarly adapted 
 to the positions in w T hich this great man was destined to be 
 placed. The light in which he viewed Louis rendered him 
 the fittest champion of the independence of Europe; and in 
 England, French influence and arbitrary power were in those 
 times so intimately connected, that he who had not only seen 
 with disapprobation, but had so sensibly felt the baneful 
 effects of Charles's connexion with France, seemed educated, 
 as it were, to be the defender of English liberty. This 
 prince's struggles in defence of his country, his success in 
 rescuing it from a situation to all appearance so desperate, 
 and the consequent failure and mortification of Louis XIV., 
 form a scene in history upon which the mind dwells with 
 unceasing delight. One never can read Louis's famous decla- 
 ration against the Hollanders, knowing the event which is to 
 follow, without feeling the heart dilate with exultation, and a 
 kind of triumphant contempt, which, though not quite con- 
 sonant to the principles of pure philosophy, never fails to give 
 the mind inexpressible satisfaction. Did the relation of such 
 events form the sole, or even any considerable part of the 
 historian's task, pleasant indeed would be his labours; but, 
 though far less agreeable, it is not a less useful or necessary 
 
 x 
 
306 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1674. 
 
 part of his business, to relate the triumphs of successful 
 wickedness, and the oppression of truth, justice, and liberty. 
 
 The interval from the separate peace between England 
 and the United Provinces, to the peace of Nymegen, was 
 chiefly employed by Charles in attempts to obtain money 
 from France and other foreign powers, in which he was 
 sometimes more, sometimes less successful; and in various 
 false professions, promises, and other devices to deceive his 
 parliament and his people, in which he uniformly failed. 
 Though neither the nature and extent of his connexion with 
 France, nor his design of introducing popery into England, 
 were known at that time, as they now are, yet there were not 
 wanting many indications of the king's disposition, and of the 
 general tendency of his designs. Reasonable persons appre- 
 hended that the supplies asked were intended to be used, not 
 for the specious purpose of maintaining the balance of Europe, 
 but for that of subduing the parliament and people who 
 should give them; and the great antipathy of the bulk of the 
 nation to popery caused many to be both more clear-sighted 
 in discovering, and more resolute in resisting the designs of 
 the court, than they would probably have shown themselves, 
 if civil liberty alone had been concerned. 
 
 When the minds of men were in the disposition which such 
 a state of things was naturally calculated to produce, it is not 
 to be wondered at that a ready, and, perhaps, a too facile 
 belief should have been accorded to the rumour of a popish 
 plot. But with the largest possible allowance for the just 
 apprehensions which were entertained, and the consequent 
 irritation of the country, it is wholly inconceivable how such 
 a plot as that brought forward by Tongue and Oates could 
 obtain any general belief. Nor can any stretch of candour 
 make us admit it to be probable, that all who pretended a 
 belief of it did seriously entertain it. On the other hand, it 
 seems an absurdity, equal almost in degree to the belief of 
 the plot itself, to suppose that it was a story fabricated by the 
 earl of Shaftesbury, and the other leaders of the whig party; 
 and it would be highly unjust, as well as uncharitable, not to 
 admit, that the generality of those who were engaged in the 
 prosecution of it were probably sincere in their belief of it, 
 since it is unquestionable that at the time very many persons, 
 whose political prej udices were of a quite different complexion, 
 
1674.] 
 
 THE POPISH PLOT OP 1678. 
 
 307 
 
 were tinder the same delusion. The unanimous votes of the 
 two houses of parliament, and the names, as well as the 
 number of those who pronounced lord Stafford to be guilty, 
 seem to put this beyond a doubt. Dryden, writing soon after 
 the time, says, in his Absalom and Achitophel, that the plot 
 was 
 
 " Bad in itself, but represented worse :" 
 that 
 
 " Some truth there was, but dash'd and brew'd with lies:" 
 and that 
 
 " Succeeding times did equal folly call, 
 Believing nothing, or believing all." 
 
 and Dryden will not, by those who are conversant in the 
 history and works of that immortal writer, be suspected either 
 of party prejudice in favour of Shaftesbury and the whigs, or 
 of any view to prejudice the country against the duke of 
 York's succession to the crown. The king repeatedly declared 
 his belief of it. These declarations, if sincere, would have 
 some weight; but if insincere, as may be reasonably sus- 
 pected, they afford a still stronger testimony to prove that 
 such belief was not exclusively a party opinion, since it can- 
 not be supposed, that even the crooked politics of Charles 
 could have led him to countenance fictions of his enemies, 
 which were not adopted by his own party. Wherefore, if 
 this question were to be decided upon the ground of authority, 
 the reality of the plot would be admitted; and it must be 
 confessed, that, with regard to facts remote, in respect either 
 of time or place, wise men generally drffide in their own 
 judgment, and defer to that of those who have had a nearer 
 view of them. But there are cases where reason speaks so 
 plainly as to make all argument drawn from authority of no 
 avail, aud this is surely one of them. Not to mention cor- 
 respondence by post on the subject of regicide, detailed com- 
 missions from the pope, silver bullets, &e. &c, and other 
 circumstances equally ridiculous, we need only advert to the 
 part attributed to the Spanish government in this conspiracy, 
 and to the alleged intention of murdering the king, to satisfy 
 ourselves that it was a forgery. 
 
 Kapin, w r ho argues the whole of this affair with a degree 
 of weakness as well as disingenuity very unusual to him, 
 seems at last to offer us a kind of compromise, and to be satis - 
 
 x2 
 
308 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1674- 
 
 fied if we will admit that there was a design or project to 
 introduce popery and arbitrary power, at the head of which 
 were the king and his brother. Of this, I am as much con- 
 vinced as he can be; but how does this justify the prosecu- 
 tion and execution of those who suffered, since few, if any of 
 them were in a situation to be trusted by the royal conspi- 
 rators with their designs? When he says, therefore, that 
 that is precisely what was understood by the conspiracy, he 
 by no means justifies those who were the principal pro- 
 secutors of the plot. The design to murder the king, he 
 calls the appendage of the plot : a strange expression this, to 
 describe the projected murder of a king; though not more 
 strange than the notion itself when applied to a plot, the 
 object of which was to render that very king absolute, and 
 to introduce the religion which he most favoured. But it is 
 to be observed, that though, in considering the bill of exclu- 
 sion, the militia bill, and other legislative proceedings, the 
 plot, as he defines it — that is to say, the design of intro- 
 ducing popery and arbitrary power— -was the important 
 point to be looked to; yet in courts of justice, and for juries 
 and judges, that which he calls the appendage was, generally 
 speaking, the sole consideration. 
 
 Although, therefore, upon a review of this truly shocking 
 transaction, we may be fairly justified in adopting the milder 
 alternative, and in imputing to the greater part of those con- 
 cerned in it, rather an extraordinary degree of blind credu- 
 lity, than the deliberate wickedness of planning and assisting 
 in the perpetration of legal murders; yet the proceedings on 
 the popish plot must always be considered as an indelible dis- 
 grace upon the English nation, in which king, parliament, 
 judges, juries, witnesses, prosecutors, have all their re- 
 spective, though certainly not equal, shares. Witnesses, of 
 such a character as not to deserve credit in the most trifling 
 cause, upon the most immaterial facts, gave evidence so in- 
 credible, or, to speak more properly, so impossible to be 
 true, that it ought not to have been believed if it had come 
 from the mouth of Cato; and upon such evidence, from such 
 witnesses, were innocent men condemned to death and exe- 
 cuted. Prosecutors, whether attorneys and solicitors-general, 
 or managers of impeachment, acted with the fury which in 
 such circumstances might be expected; juries partook natu- 
 rally enough of the national ferment; and judges, whose duty 
 
1675.] 
 
 HABEAS CORPUS ACT. 
 
 309 
 
 it was to guard them against such impressions, were scan- 
 dalously active in confirming them in their prejudices and 
 inflaming their passions. The king, who is supposed to have 
 disbelieved the whole of the plot, never once exercised his 
 glorious prerogative of mercy. It is said he dared not. His 
 throne, perhaps his life, was at stake; and history does not 
 furnish us with the example of any monarch with whom the 
 lives of innocent or even meritorious subjects ever appeared 
 to be of much weight, when put in balance against such con- 
 siderations. 
 
 The measures of the prevailing party in the house of com- 
 mons, in these times, appear (with the exception of their 
 dreadful proceedings in the business of the pretended plot, 
 and of their violence towards those who petitioned and ad- 
 dressed against parliament) to have been, in general, highly 
 laudable and meritorious; and yet I am afraid it may be 
 justly suspected that it was precisely to that part of their 
 conduct which related to the plot, and which is most repre- 
 hensible, that they were indebted for their power to make 
 the noble, and, in some instances, successful struggles for 
 liberty, which do so much honour to their memory. The 
 danger to be apprehended from military force being always, 
 in the view of wise men, the most urgent, they first voted the 
 disbanding of the army, and the two houses passed a bill for 
 that purpose, to which the king found himself obliged to 
 consent. But to the bill which followed, for establishing the 
 regular assembling of the militia, and for providing for their 
 being in arms six weeks in the year, he opposed his royal 
 negative; thus making his stand upon the same point on 
 which his father had done; a circumstance, which, if events 
 had taken a turn against him, would not have failed of being 
 much noticed by historians. Civil securities for freedom 
 came to be afterwards considered; and it is to be remarked, 
 that to these times of heat and passion, and to one of those 
 parliaments which so disgraced themselves and the nation by 
 the countenance given to Oates and Bedloe, and by the per- 
 secution of so many innocent victims, we are indebted for 
 the Habeas Corpus act, the most important barrier against 
 tyranny, and best framed protection for the liberty of indi- 
 viduals, that has ever existed in any ancient or modern com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 But the inefficacy of mere laws in favour of the subjects, 
 
oli® INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1679. 
 
 in the case of the administration of them falling into the 
 hands of persons hostile to the spirit in which they had been 
 provided, had been so fatally evinced by the general history 
 of England, ever since the grant of the Great Charter, and 
 more especially by the transactions of the preceding reign, 
 that the parliament justly deemed their work incomplete 
 unless the duke of York were excluded from the succession 
 to the crown. A bill, therefore, for the purpose of excluding 
 that prince was prepared, and passed the house of commons; 
 but being vigorously resisted by the court, by the church, 
 and by the tories, was lost in the house of lords. The 
 restrictions offered by the king to be put upon a popish suc- 
 cessor are supposed to have been among the most powerful 
 of those means to which he was indebted for his success. 
 
 The dispute was no longer, whether or not the dangers 
 resulting from James's succession were real, and such as 
 ought to be guarded against by parliamentary provisions, 
 but whether the exclusion or restrictions furnished the most 
 safe and eligible mode of compassing the object which both 
 sides pretended to have in view. The argument upon this 
 state of the question is clearly, forcibly, and, I think, con- 
 vincingly, stated by Rapin, who exposes very ably the ex- 
 treme folly of trusting to measures, without consideration of 
 the men who are to execute them. Even in Hume's state- 
 ment of the question, whatever may have been his intention, 
 the arguments in favour of the exclusion appear to me 
 greatly to preponderate. Indeed it is not easy to conceive 
 upon what principles even the tories could justify their sup- 
 port of the restrictions. Many among them, no doubt, saw 
 the provisions in the same light in which the whigs repre- 
 sented them, as an expedient, admirably, indeed, adapted to 
 the real object of upholding the present king's power, by the 
 defeat of the exclusion, but never likely to take effect for 
 their pretended purpose of controlling that of his successor, 
 and supported them for that very reason. But such a prin- 
 ciple of conduct was too fraudulent to be avowed; nor ought 
 it, perhaps, in candour to be imputed to the majority of the 
 party. To those who acted with good faith, and meant that 
 the restrictions should really take place and be effectual, 
 surely it ought to have occurred, (and to those who most 
 prized the prerogatives of the crown it ought most forcibly to 
 
1679.] POWERS OF THE CROWN. 311 
 
 have occurred,) that in consenting to curtail the powers of the 
 crown, rather than to alter the succession, they were adopting 
 the greater in order to avoid the lesser evil. The question of 
 what are to be the powers of the crown, is surely of superior 
 importance to that of who shall wear it? Those, at least, 
 who consider the royal prerogative as vested in the king, 
 not for his sake, but for that of his subjects, must consider 
 the one of these questions as much above the other in dig- 
 nity as the rights of the public are more valuable than 
 those of an individual. In this view the prerogatives of the 
 crown are, in substance and effect, the rights of the people; 
 and these rights of the people were not to be sacrificed to 
 the purpose of preserving the succession to the most favoured 
 prince, much less to one who, on account of his religious per- 
 suasion, was justly feared and suspected. In truth, the 
 question between the exclusion and restrictions seems pecu- 
 liarly calculated to ascertain the different views in which 
 the different parties in this country have seen, and perhaps 
 ever will see, the prerogatives of the crown. The whigs, 
 who consider them as a trust for the people, — a doctrine 
 which the tories themselves, when pushed in argument, will 
 sometimes admit, — naturally think it their duty rather to 
 change the manager of the trust than to impair the subject of 
 it; while others, who consider them as the right or property 
 of the king, will as naturally act as they would do in the case of 
 any other property, and consent to the loss or annihilation of any 
 part of it, for the purpose of preserving the remainder to him 
 whom they style the rightful owner. If the people be the 
 sovereign and the king the delegate, it is better to change 
 the bailiff than to injure the farm; but if the king be the 
 proprietor, it is better the farm should be impaired— nay, part 
 of it destroyed — than that the whole should pass over to an 
 usurper. The royal prerogative ought, according to the 
 whigs, (not in the case of a popish successor only, but in all 
 cases,) to be reduced to such powers as are in their exercise 
 beneficial to the people; and of the benefit of these they will 
 not rashly suffer the people to be deprived, whether the 
 executive power be in the hands of an hereditary or of an 
 elected king, of a regent, or of any other denomination of 
 magistrate; while, on the other hand, they who consider 
 prerogative with reference only to royalty, will, with equal 
 
312 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1679. 
 
 readiness, consent either to the extension or the suspension of 
 its exercise, as the occasional interests of the prince may seem 
 to require. The senseless plea of a divine and indefeasible 
 right in James, which even the legislature was incompetent 
 to set aside, though as inconsistent with the declarations of 
 parliament in the statute book, and with the whole practice 
 of the English constitution, as it is repugnant to nature and 
 common sense, was yet warmly insisted upon by the high- 
 church party. Such an argument, as might naturally be 
 expected, operated rather to provoke the whigs to perse- 
 verance than to dissuade them from their measure: it was, 
 in their eyes, an additional merit belonging to the exclusion 
 bill, that it strengthened, by one instance more, the authority 
 of former statutes in reprobating a doctrine which seems to 
 imply that man can have a property in his fellow-creatures. 
 By far the best argument in favour of the restrictions, is the 
 practical one that they could be obtained, and that the ex- 
 clusion could not; but the value of this argument is chiefly 
 proved by the event. The exclusionists had a fair prospect 
 of success, and their plan being clearly the best, they were 
 justified in pursuing it. 
 
 The spirit of resistance which the king showed in the 
 instance of the militia and the exclusion bills, seems to have 
 been systematically confined to those cases where he sup- 
 posed his power to be more immediately concerned. In the 
 prosecution of the aged and innocent lord Stafford, he was so 
 far from interfering in behalf of that nobleman, that many of 
 those most in his confidence, and, as it is affirmed, the duchess 
 of Portsmouth herself, openly favoured the prosecution. Even 
 after the dissolution of his last parliament, w T hen he had so far 
 subdued his enemies as to be no longer under any apprehen- 
 sions from them, he did not think it worth while to save the 
 life of Plunket, the popish archbishop of Armagh, of whose 
 innocence no doubt could be entertained. But this is not to 
 be wondered at, since, in all transactions relative to the popish 
 plot, minds of a very different cast from Charles's became, as 
 by some fatality, divested of all their wonted sentiments of 
 justice and humanity. Who can read without horror, the 
 account of that savage murmur of applause, which broke out 
 upon one of the villains at the bar, swearing positively to 
 Stafford's having proposed the murder of the king? And 
 
1679.] SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE'S ADVICE. 313 
 
 how is this horror deepened, when we reflect, that in that 
 odious cry were probably mingled the voices of men to whose 
 memory every lover of the English constitution is bound to 
 pay the tribute of gratitude and respect! Even after con- 
 demnation, lord Russell himself, whose character is wholly 
 (this instance excepted) free from the stain of rancour or 
 cruelty, stickled for the severer mode of executing the 
 sentence, in a manner which his fear of the king's establishing 
 a precedent of pardoning in cases of impeachment, (for this, 
 no doubt, was his motive,) cannot satisfactorily excuse. 
 
 In an early period of the king's difficulties, sir William 
 Temple, whose life and character is a refutation of the vulgar 
 notion that philosophy and practical good sense in business 
 are incompatible attainments, recommended to him the plan 
 of governing by a council, which was to consist in great part 
 of the most popular noblemen and gentlemen in the kingdom. 
 Such persons being the natural, as well as the safest, mediators 
 between princes and discontented subjects, this seems to have 
 been the best possible expedient. Hume says it was found 
 too feeble a remedy; but he does not take notice that it was 
 never in fact tried, inasmuch as not only the king's confidence 
 was withheld from the most considerable members of the 
 council, but even the most important determinations were 
 taken without consulting the council itself. Nor can there be 
 a doubt but the king's views, in adopting Temple's advice, 
 were totally different from those of the adviser, whose only 
 error in this transaction seems to have consisted in recom- 
 mending a plan, wherein confidence and fair dealing were of 
 necessity to be principal ingredients, to a prince whom he 
 well knew to be incapable of either. Accordingly, having 
 appointed the council in April, with a promise of being go- 
 verned in important matters by their advice, he in July dis- 
 solved one parliament without their concurrence, and in 
 October forbade them even to give their opinions upon the 
 propriety of a resolution which he had taken of proroguing 
 another. From that time he probably considered the council 
 to be, as it was, virtually dissolved; and it was not long 
 before means presented themselves to him, better adapted, in 
 his estimation, even to his immediate objects, and certainly 
 more suitable to his general designs. The union between the 
 court and the church party, which had been so closely ce- 
 
314 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 [1679. 
 
 merited by their successful resistance to the Exclusion Bill, 
 and its authors, had at length acquired such a degree of 
 strength and consistency, that the king ventured first to ap- 
 point Oxford, instead of London, for the meeting of parlia- 
 ment; and then, having secured to himself a good pension 
 from France, to dissolve the parliament there met, with a full 
 resolution never to call another; to which resolution, indeed, 
 Louis had bound him, as one of the conditions on which he 
 was to receive a stipend. 1 No measure was ever attended 
 with more complete success. The most flattering addresses 
 poured in from all parts of the kingdom; divine right, and 
 indiscriminate obedience, were everywhere the favourite 
 doctrines; and men seemed to vie with each other who should 
 have the honour of the greatest share in the glorious work of 
 slavery, by securing to the king, for the present, and after 
 him to the duke, absolute and uncontrollable power. They 
 who, either because Charles had been called a forgiving 
 prince by his flatterers, (upon what ground I could never dis- 
 cover,) or from some supposed connexion between indolence 
 and good nature, had deceived themselves into a hope that 
 his tyranny would be of the milder sort, found themselves 
 much disappointed in their expectations. 
 
 The whole history of the remaining part of his reign ex- 
 hibits an uninterrupted series of attacks upon the liberty, 
 property, and lives of his subjects. The character of the 
 government appeared first, and with the most marked and 
 prominent features, in Scotland. The condemnation of Argyle 
 and Weir, the one for having subjoined an explanation when 
 he took the test oath, the other for having kept company with 
 a rebel, whom it was not proved he knew to be such, and who 
 had never been proclaimed, resemble more the acts of Tiberius 
 and Domitian, than those of even the most arbitrary modern 
 governments. It is true, the sentences were not executed; 
 Weir was reprieved; and whether or not Argyle, if he had 
 not deemed it more prudent to escape by flight, would have 
 experienced the same clemency, cannot now be ascertained. 
 The terror of these examples would have been, in the judg- 
 ment of most men, abundantly sufficient to teach the people 
 of Scotland their duty, and to satisfy them that their lives, as 
 
 Daliymple's Memoirs. 
 
1679.] 
 
 TYRANNY OF CHARLES IT. 
 
 315 
 
 well as everything else they had been used to call their own, 
 were now completely in the power of their masters. But the 
 government did not stop here, and having outlawed thousands, 
 upon the same pretence upon which Weir had been condemned, 
 inflicted capital punishment upon such criminals of both sexes 
 as refused to answer, or answered otherwise than was pre- 
 scribed to them to the most ensnaring questions. 
 
 In England, the city of London seemed to hold out for a 
 certain time, like a strong fortress in a conquered country; 
 and, by means of this citadel, Shaftesbury and others were 
 saved from the vengeance of the court. But this resistance, 
 however honourable to the corporation who made it, could 
 not be of long duration. The weapons of law and justice 
 were found feeble, when opposed to the power of a monarch 
 who was at the head of a numerous and bigoted party of the 
 nation, and who, which was most material of all, had enabled 
 himself to govern without a parliament. Civil resistance in 
 this country, even to the most illegal attacks of royal tyranny, 
 has never, I believe, been successful, unless when supported 
 by parliament, or at least by a great party in one or other of 
 the two houses. The court having wrested from the livery 
 of London, partly by corruption, and partly by violence, the 
 free election of their mayor and sheriffs, did not wait the ac- 
 complishment of their plan for the destruction of the whole 
 corporation, which, from their first success, they justly deemed 
 certain, but immediately proceeded to put in execution their 
 system of oppression. Pilkington, Colt, and Gates were fined 
 a hundred thousand pounds each for having spoken disrespect- 
 fully of the duke of York; Barnardiston, ten thousand, for 
 having in a private letter expressed sentiments deemed im- 
 proper; and Sidney, Russell, and Armstrong, found that the 
 just and mild principles which characterise the criminal law 
 of England could no longer protect their lives, when the sacri- 
 fice was called for by the policy or vengeance of the king. 
 To give an account of all the oppression of this period, would 
 be to enumerate every arrest, every trial, every sentence, that 
 took place in questions between the crown and the subjects. 
 
 Of the Rye House plot it may be said, much more truly 
 than of the popish, that there was in it some truth, mixed 
 with much falsehood; and though many of the circumstances 
 in Kealing's account are nearly as absurd and ridiculous as 
 
316 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1683. 
 
 those in Oates's, it seems probable that there was among some 
 of those accused a notion of assassinating the king; but 
 whether this notion was ever ripened into what may be called 
 a design, and, much more, whether it were ever evinced by 
 such an overt act as the law requires for conviction, is very 
 doubtful. In regard to the conspirators of higher ranks, from 
 whom all suspicion of participation in the intended assassina- 
 tion has been long since done away, there is unquestionably 
 reason to believe that they had often met and consulted, as 
 well for the purpose of ascertaining the means they actually 
 possessed as for that of devising others for delivering their 
 country from the dreadful servitude into which it had fallen; 
 and thus far their conduct appears clearly to have been laud- 
 able. If they went further, and did anything which could be 
 fairly construed into an actual conspiracy to levy war against 
 the king, they acted, considering the disposition of the nation 
 at that period, very indiscreetly. But whether their pro- 
 ceedings had ever gone this length, is far from certain. Mon- 
 mouth's communications with the king, when we reflect upon 
 all the circumstances of those communications, deserve not 
 the smallest attention ; nor indeed, if they did, does the letter 
 which he afterwards withdrew, prove anything upon this 
 point. And it is an outrage to common sense to call lord 
 Grey's narrative, written, as he himself states in his letter to 
 James IL, while the question of his pardon was pend- 
 ing, an authentic account. That which is most certain in 
 this affair is, that they had committed no overt act, indicating 
 the imagining of the king's death, even according to the 
 most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; 
 much less was any such act legally proved against them. 
 And the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except 
 by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon 
 which were expressly limited to a certain time, which in 
 these cases had elapsed; so that it is impossible not to assent 
 to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatized the con- 
 demnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant viola- 
 tion of law and justice. 
 
 The proceedings in Sidney's case were still more detestable. 
 The production of papers, containing speculative opinions 
 upon government and liberty, written long before, and per- 
 haps never even intended to be published, together with the 
 
1683.] 
 
 TRIAL OF SIDNEY. 
 
 317 
 
 use made of those papers, in considering them as a substitute 
 for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a 
 compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be 
 paralleled in the history of juridical tyranny. But the 
 validity of pretences was little attended to at that time, in 
 the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruc- 
 tion, and upon evidence such as has been stated was this 
 great and excellent man condemned to die. Pardon was not 
 to be expected. Mr. Hume says, that such an interference 
 on the part of the king, though it might have been an act of 
 heroic generosity, could not be regarded as an indispensable 
 duty. He might have said, with more propriety, that it was 
 idle to expect that the government, after having incurred so 
 much guilt in order to obtain the sentence, should, by re- 
 mitting it, relinquish the object just when it was within its 
 grasp. The same historian considers the jury as highly 
 blameable, and so do I; but what was their guilt in com- 
 parison of that of the court who tried, and of the government 
 who prosecuted, in this infamous cause? Yet the jury, being 
 the only party that can with any colour be stated as acting 
 independently of the government, is the only one mentioned 
 by him as blameable. The prosecutor is wholly omitted in 
 his censure, and so is the court; this last, not from any ten- 
 derness for the judge, (who to do this author justice, is no 
 favourite with him,) but lest the odious connexion between 
 that branch of the judicature and the government should 
 strike the reader too forcibly; for Jeffreys, in this instance, 
 ought to be regarded as the mere tool and instrument, (a fit 
 one, no doubt,) of the prince who had appointed him for the 
 purpose of this and similar services. Lastly, the king is 
 gravely introduced on the question of pardon, as if he had 
 had no prior concern in the cause, and were now to decide 
 upon the propriety of extending mercy to a criminal con- 
 demned by a court of judicature; nor are we once reminded 
 what that judicature was, by whom appointed, by whom in- 
 fluenced, by whom called upon, to receive that detestable 
 evidence, the very recollection of which, even at this distance 
 of time, fires every honest heart with indignation. As well 
 might we palliate the murders of Tiberius, who seldom put 
 to death his victims without a previous decree of his senate. 
 The moral of all this seems to be, that whenever a prince 
 
 ! 
 
318 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1683. 
 
 can, by intimidation, corruption, illegal evidence, or other 
 such means, obtain a verdict against a subject whom he dis- 
 likes, he may cause him to be executed without any breach 
 of indispensable duty; nay, that it is an act of heroic gene- 
 rosity if he spares him. I never reflect on Mr. Hume's 
 statement of this matter but with the deepest regret. Widely 
 as I differ from him upon many other occasions, this appears 
 to me to be the most reprehensible passage of his whole work. 
 A spirit of adulation towards deceased princes, though in a 
 good measure free from the imputation of interested mean- 
 ness, which is justly attached to flattery when applied to 
 living monarchs, yet, as it is less intelligible with respect to 
 its motives than the other, so is it in its consequences still 
 more pernicious to the general interests of mankind. Fear 
 of censure from contemporaries will seldom have much effect 
 upon men in situations of unlimited authority: they will too 
 often flatter themselves that the same power which enables 
 them to commit the crime, will secure them from reproach. 
 The dread of posthumous infamy, therefore, being the only 
 restraint, their consciences excepted, upon the passions of 
 such persons, it is lamentable that this last defence (feeble 
 enough at best) should in any degree be impaired; and im- 
 paired it must be, if not totally destroyed, when tyrants can 
 hope to find in a man like Hume, no less eminent for the in- 
 tegrity and benevolence of his heart than for the depth and 
 soundness of his understanding, an apologist for even their 
 foulest murders. 
 
 Thus fell Russell and Sidney, two names that will, it is 
 hoped, be for ever dear to every English heart. When their 
 memory shall cease to be an object of respect and veneration, 
 it requires no spirit of prophecy to foretel that English 
 liberty will be fast approaching to its final consummation. 
 Their deportment was such as might be expected from men 
 who knew themselves to be suffering, not for their crimes, 
 but for their virtues. In courage they were equal, but the 
 fortitude of Russell, who was connected with the world by 
 private and domestic ties, which Sidney had not, was put to 
 the severer trial; and the story of the last days of this excel- 
 lent man's life fills the mind with such a mixture of tender- 
 ness and admiration, that I know not any scene in history 
 that more powerfully excites our sympathy, or goes more 
 directly to the heart. 
 
1683.] OXFORD DECREE. 319 
 
 The very day on which Russell was executed, the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford passed their famous decree, condemning 
 formally, as impious and heretical propositions, every prin- 
 ciple upon which the constitution of this or any other free 
 country can maintain itself. Nor was this learned body 
 satisfied with stigmatizing such principles as contrary to the 
 Holy Scriptures, to the decrees of councils, to the writings of 
 the fathers, to the faith and profession of the primitive church, 
 as destructive of the kingly government, the safety of his 
 majesty's person, the public peace, the laws of nature, and 
 bounds of human society; but after enumerating the several 
 obnoxious propositions, among which was one declaring all 
 civil authority derived from the people; another, asserting a 
 mutual contract, tacit or express, between the king and his 
 subjects; a third, maintaining the lawfulness of changing the 
 succession to the crown; with many others of a like nature, 
 they solemnly decreed all and every of those propositions to 
 be not only false and seditious, but impious, and that the 
 books which contained them were fitted to lead to rebellion, 
 murder of princes, and atheism itself. Such are the absurdi- 
 ties which men are not ashamed to utter in order to cast 
 odious imputations upon their adversaries; and such the 
 manner in which churchmen will abuse, when it suits their 
 policy, the holy name of that religion whose first precept is 
 to love one another, for the purpose of teaching us to hate 
 our neighbours with more than ordinary rancour. If " Much 
 Ado about Nothing" had been published in those days, the 
 town-clerk's declaration, that receiving a thousand ducats for 
 accusing the Lady Hero wrongfully, was flat burglary, might 
 be supposed to be a satire upon this decree; yet Shakspere, 
 well as he knew human nature, not only as to its general 
 course, but in all its eccentric deviations, could never dream 
 that, in the persons of Dogberry, Verges, and their followers, 
 he was representing the vice-chancellors and doctors of our 
 learned university. 
 
 Among the oppressions of this period, most of which were 
 attended with consequences so much more important to the 
 several objects of persecution, it may seem scarcely worth 
 while to notice the expulsion of John Locke from Christ 
 Church College, Oxford. But besides the interest which 
 every incident in the life of a person so deservedly eminent, 
 
320 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1683. 
 
 naturally excites, there appears to have been something in 
 the transaction itself characteristic of the spirit of the times, 
 as well as of the general nature of absolute power. Mr. Locke 
 was known to have been intimately connected with lord 
 Shaftesbury, and had very prudently judged it advisable for 
 him to prolong for some time his residence upon the con- 
 tinent, to which he had resorted originally on account of his 
 health. A suspicion, as it has been since proved unfounded, 
 that he was the author of a pamphlet which gave offence to 
 the government, induced the king to insist upon his removal 
 from his studentship at Christ Church. Sunderland writes, 
 by the king's command, to Dr. Fell, bishop of Oxford and 
 dean of Christ Church. The reverend prelate answers, that 
 he has long had an eye upon Mr. Locke's behaviour; but 
 though frequent attempts had been made (attempts of which 
 the bishop expresses no disapprobation,) to draw him into im- 
 prudent conversation, by attacking, in his company, the repu- 
 tation and insulting the memory of his late patron and friend, 
 and thus to make his gratitude and all the best feelings of 
 his heart instrumental to his ruin, these attempts all proved 
 unsuccessful. Hence the bishop infers, not the innocence of 
 Mr. Locke, but that he was a great master of concealment, 
 both as to words and looks; for looks, it is to be supposed, 
 would have furnished a pretext for his expulsion, more 
 decent than any which had yet been discovered. An expe- 
 dient is then suggested to drive Mr. Locke to a dilemma, by 
 summoning him to attend the college on the first of January 
 ensuing. If he do not appear, he shall be expelled for con- 
 tumacy; if he come, matter of charge may be found against 
 him for what he shall have said at London or elsewhere, 
 where he will have been less upon his guard than at Oxford. 
 Some have ascribed Fell's hesitation, if it can be so called, in 
 executing the king's order, to his unwillingness to injure 
 Locke, who was his friend; others, with more reason, to the 
 doubt of the legality of the order. However this may have 
 been, neither his scruple nor his reluctance was regarded by 
 a court who knew its own power. A peremptory order was 
 accordingly sent, and immediate obedience ensued. Thus 
 while, without the shadow of a crime, Mr. Locke lost a situa- 
 tion attended with some emolument and great convenience, 
 was the university deprived of, or rather thus, from the base 
 
1683.] FORFEITURE OF CHARTERS. 321 
 
 principles of servility, did she cast away the man, the having 
 produced whom is now her chiefest glory; and thus, to those 
 who are not determined to be blind, did the true nature of 
 absolute power discover itself, against which the middling 
 station is not more secure than the most exalted. Tyranny, 
 when glutted with the blood of the great, and the plunder of 
 the rich, will condescend to hunt humbler game, and make a 
 peaceable and innocent fellow of a college the object of its 
 persecution. In this instance, one would almost imagine there 
 was some instinctive sagacity in the government of that time, 
 which pointed out to them, even before he had made himself 
 known to the world, the man who was destined to be the 
 most successful adversary of superstition and tyranny. 
 
 The king, during the remainder of his reign, seems, with 
 the exception of Armstrong's execution, which must be added 
 to the catalogue of his murders, to have directed his attacks 
 more against the civil rights, properties, and liberties, than 
 against the lives of his subjects. Convictions against evidence, 
 sentences against law, enormous fines, cruel imprisonments, 
 were the principal engines 1 employed for the purpose of 
 breaking the spirit of individuals, and fitting their necks for 
 the yoke. But it was not thought fit to trust wholly to the 
 effect which such examples would produce upon the public. 
 That the subjugation of the people might be complete, and 
 despotism be established upon the most solid foundation, 
 measures of a more general nature and effect were adopted; 
 and first, the charter of London, and then those of almost all 
 the other corporations in England, were either forfeited or 
 forced to a surrender. By this act of violence two important 
 points were thought to be gained; one, that in every regular 
 assemblage of the people, in any part of the kingdom, the 
 crown would have a commanding influence; the other, that 
 in case the king should find himself compelled to break his 
 engagement to France, and to call a parliament, a great 
 majority of members would be returned by electors of his 
 nomination, and subject to his control. In the affair of the 
 charter of London, it was seen, as in the case of ship-money, 
 
 1 The expedient of transporting men among common felons for political 
 offences was not then invented, which is the more extraordinary, as it had 
 begun in this reign to be in sGnie degree made use of in religious persecu- 
 tions. 
 
 y 
 
322 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [168o. 
 
 how idle it is to look to the integrity of judges for a barrier 
 against royal encroachments, when the courts of justice are 
 not under the constant and vigilant control of parliament. 
 And it is not to be wondered at, that, after such a warning, 
 and with no hope of seeing a parliament assemble, even they 
 who still retained their attachment to the true constitution of 
 their country, should rather give way to the torrent, than 
 make a fruitless and dangerous resistance. 
 
 Charles being thus completely master, was determined that 
 the relative situation of him and his subjects should be clearly 
 understood, for which purpose he ordered a declaration to be 
 framed, wherein, after having stated that he considered the 
 degree of confidence they had reposed in him as an honour 
 particular to his reign, which not one of his predecessors had 
 ever dared even to hope for, he assured them he would use it 
 with all possible moderation, and convince even the most 
 violent republicans, that as the crown was the origin of the 
 rights and liberties of the people, so was it their most certain 
 and secure support. This gracious declaration was ready for 
 the press at the time of the king's death, and if he had lived 
 to issue it, there can be little doubt how it would have been 
 received, at a time when 
 
 nunquam libertas gratior extat 
 Quani sub rege pio, 
 
 was the theme of every song, and, by the help of some per- 
 version of Scripture, the text of every sermon. But whatever 
 might be the language of flatterers, and how loud soever the 
 cry of a triumphant, but deluded party, there were not 
 wanting men of nobler sentiments, and of more rational views. 
 Minds once thoroughly imbued with the love of what Sidney, 
 in his last moments, so emphatically called the good old cause, 
 will not easily relinquish their principles: nor was the man- 
 ner in which absolute power was exercised, such as to recon- 
 cile to it, in practice, those who had always been averse to 
 it in speculation. The hatred of tyranny must, in such per- 
 sons, have been exasperated by the experience of its effects, 
 and their attachment to liberty proportionably confirmed. To 
 them the state of their country must have been intolerable : 
 to reflect upon the efforts of their fathers, once their pride 
 and glory, and whom they themselves had followed with no 
 
1685.] INTENDED CHANGE OF MEASURES. 323 
 
 unequal steps, and to see the result of all in the scenes that 
 now presented themselves, must have filled their minds with 
 sensations of the deepest regret, and feelings bordering at 
 least on despondency. To us, who have the opportunity of 
 combining, in our view of this period, not only the preceding 
 but subsequent transactions, the consideration of it may sug- 
 gest reflections far different, and speculations more consola- 
 tory. Indeed, I know not that history can furnish a more 
 forcible lesson against despondency, than by recording, that 
 within a short time from those dismal days in which men of 
 the greatest constancy despaired, and had reason to do so, 
 within five years from the death of Sidney, arose the brightest 
 era of freedom known to the annals of our country. 
 
 It is said that the king, when at the summit of his power, 
 was far from happy; and a notion has been generally enter- 
 tained, that not long before his death he had resolved upon 
 the recal of Monmouth, and a correspondent change of sys- 
 tem. That some such change was apprehended seems ex- 
 tremely probable, from the earnest desire which the court of 
 France, as well as the duke of York's party in England, en- 
 tertained, in the last years of Charles's life, to remove the 
 marquis of Halifax, who was supposed to have friendly dispo- 
 sitions to Monmouth. Among the various objections to that 
 nobleman's political principles, we find the charge most relied 
 upon, for the purpose of injuring him in the mind of the king, 
 was founded on the opinion he had delivered in council, in 
 favour of modelling the charters of the British colonies in 
 North America upon the principles of the rights and privi- 
 leges of Englishmen. There was no room to doubt (he was 
 accused of saying) that the same laws under which we live 
 in England, should be established in a country composed of 
 Englishmen. He even dilated upon this, and omitted none of 
 the reasons by which it can be proved, that an absolute 
 government is neither so happy nor so safe as that which is 
 tempered by laws, and which limits the authority of the 
 prince. He exaggerated, it was said, the mischiefs of a sove- 
 reign power, and declared plainly, that he could not make up 
 his mind to live under a king who should have it in his power 
 to take, when he pleased, the money he might have in his 
 pocket. All the other ministers had combated, as might be 
 expected, sentiments so extraordinary; and without entering 
 
 y2 
 
324 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1685. 
 
 into the general question of the comparative value of different 
 forms of government, maintained that his majesty could and 
 ought to govern countries so distant, in the manner that 
 should appear to him most suitable for preserving or augment- 
 ing the strength and riches of the mother country. It had 
 been therefore resolved, that the government and council of 
 the Provinces under the new charter should not be obliged 
 to call assemblies of the colonists for the purpose of imposing 
 taxes, or making other important regulations, but should do 
 what they thought tit, without rendering any account of their 
 actions, except to his Britannic majesty. The affair having 
 been so decided with a concurrence only short of unanimity, 
 was no longer considered as a matter of importance, nor would 
 it be worth recording, if the duke of York and the French 
 court had not fastened upon it, as affording the best evidence 
 of the clanger to be apprehended from having a man of Hali- 
 fax's principles in any situation of trust or power. There is 
 something curious in discovering, that even at this early 
 period a question relative to North American liberty, and 
 even to North American taxation, was considered as the test 
 of principles friendly, or adverse to arbitrary power at home 
 But the truth is, that among the several controversies which 
 have arisen, there is no other wherein the natural rights of 
 man on the one hand, and the authority of artificial institution 
 on the other, as applied respectively, by the whigs and tories, 
 to the English constitution, are so fairly put in issue, nor by 
 which the line of separation between the two parties is sa 
 strongly and distinctly marked. 
 
 There is some reason for believing that the court of Ver- 
 sailles had either wholly discontinued, or at least had become 
 very remiss in, thepayments of Charles's pension; and it is not 
 unlikely that this consideration may have induced him either 
 really to think of calling a, parliament, or at least to threaten 
 Louis with such a measure, in order to make that prince 
 more punctual in performing his part of their secret treaty. 
 But whether or not any secret change was really intended, or 
 if it were, to what extent, and to what objects directed, are 
 points which cannot now be ascertained, no public steps 
 having ever been taken in this affair, and his majesty's inten- 
 tions, if in truth he had any such, becoming abortive by the 
 sudden illness which seized him on the 1st of February, 1685, 
 
1685.] CHARACTER OF CHARLES II. 325 
 
 and which, in a few days afterwards, put an end to his reign 
 and life. His death was by many supposed to have been the 
 effect of poison; but although there is reason to believe that 
 this suspicion was harboured by persons very near to him, and 
 among others, as I have heard, by the duchess of Portsmouth, 
 it appears, upon the whole, to rest upon very slender founda- 
 tions. 1 
 
 With respect to the character of this prince, upon the de- 
 lineation of which so much pains have been employed, by the 
 various writers who treat of the history of his time, it must 
 be confessed that the facts which have been noticed in the 
 foregoing pages furnish but too many illustrations of the more 
 unfavourable parts of it. From these, we may collect, that his 
 ambition was directed solely against his subjects, while he was 
 completely indifferent concerning the figure which he or they 
 might make in the general affairs of Europe; and that his de- 
 sire of power was more unmixed with love of glory than that 
 of any other man whom history has recorded; that he was un- 
 principled, ungrateful, mean, and treacherous, to which may be 
 added, vindictive, and remorseless. For Burnet, in refusing to 
 him the praise of clemency and forgiveness, seems to be perfectly 
 justifiable, nor is it conceivable upon what pretence his parti- 
 sans have taken this ground of panegyric. I doubt whether a 
 single instance can be produced, of his having spared the life 
 of any one whom motives either of policy or of revenge 
 prompted him to destroy. To allege that of Monmouth, as it 
 would be an affront to human nature, so would it likewise im- 
 ply the most severe of all satires against the monarch himself, 
 and we may add too, an undeserved one. For in order to 
 consider it as an act of meritorious forbearance on his part, 
 that he did not follow the example of Constantine and 
 Philip II., by imbruing his hands in the blood of his son, 
 we must first suppose him to have been wholly void of every 
 natural affection, which does not appear to have been the case. 
 
 1 Mr. Fox had this report from the family of his mother, great grand- 
 daughter to the duchess of Portsmouth. The duchess of Portsmouth lived 
 to a very advanced age, and retained her faculties to the period of her death, 
 which happeued in 1734, at Aubigny. Mr. Fox's mother, when very young, 
 saw her at that place ; and many of the Lenox family, with whom Mr. Fox 
 was subsequently acquainted, had, no doubt, frequently conversed with 
 her. — Ed. 
 
326 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. [1685. 
 
 His declaration, that he would have pardoned Essex, being 
 made when that nobleman was dead, and not followed by any 
 act evincing its sincerity, can surely obtain no credit from 
 men of sense. If he had really had the intention, he ought 
 not to have made such a declaration, unless he accompanied 
 it with some mark of kindness to the relations, or with some 
 act of mercy to the friends, of the deceased. Considering it 
 .as a mere piece of hypocrisy, we cannot help looking upon it 
 as one of the most odious passages of his life. This ill-timed 
 boast of his intended mercy, and the brutal taunt with which 
 he accompanied his mitigation (if so it may be called) of 
 Russell's sentence, show his insensibility and hardness to have 
 been such, that in questions where right feelings were con- 
 cerned, his good sense, and even the good taste for which he 
 has been so much extolled, seemed wholly to desert him. 
 
 On the other hand, it would be want of candour to main- 
 tain, that Charles was entirely destitute of good qualities; nor 
 was the propriety of Burnet's comparison between him and 
 Tiberius ever felt, I imagine, by any one but its author. He 
 was gay and affable, and, if incapable of the sentiments be- 
 longing to pride of a laudable sort, he was at least free from 
 haughtiness and insolence. The praise of politeness, which 
 the stoics are not perhaps wrong in classing among the 
 moral virtues, provided they admit it to be one of the lowest 
 order, has never been denied him, and he had in an eminent 
 degree that facility of temper which, though considered by 
 some moralists as nearly allied to vice, yet, inasmuch as it 
 contributes greatly to the happiness of those around us, is in 
 itself not only an engaging, but an estimable quality. His 
 support of the queen during the heats raised by the popish 
 plot, ought to be taken rather as a proof that he w r as not a 
 monster, than to be ascribed to him as a merit; but his 
 steadiness to his brother, though it may and ought, in a 
 great measure, to be accounted for upon selfish principles, 
 had at least a strong resemblance to virtue. 
 
 The best part of this prince's character seems to have been 
 his kindness towards his mistresses, and his affection for 
 his children, and others nearly connected to him by the ties 
 of blood. His recommendation of the duchess of Portsmouth 
 and Mrs. Gwyn, upon his death-bed, to his successor, is 
 much to his honour; and they who censure it, seem, in their 
 
1685.] REFLECTIONS UPON HIS REIGN. 327 
 
 zeal to show themselves strict moralists, to have suffered 
 their notions of vice and virtue to have fallen into strange 
 confusion. Charles's connexion with those ladies might be 
 vicious, but at a moment when that connexion was upon 
 the point of being finally and irrevocably dissolved, to con- 
 cern himself about their future welfare, and to recommend 
 them to his brother with earnest tenderness, was virtue. It 
 is not for the interest of morality that the good and evil 
 actions, even of bad men, should be confounded. His affec- 
 tion for the duke of Gloucester, and for the duchess of 
 Orleans, seems to have been sincere and cordial. To attri- 
 bute, as some have done, his grief for the loss of the first to 
 political considerations, founded upon an intended balance of 
 power between his two brothers, would be an absurd refine- 
 ment, whatever were his general disposition; but when we 
 reflect upon that carelessness which, especially in his youth, 
 was a conspicuous feature of his character, the absurdity be- 
 comes still more striking. And though Burnet more covertly, 
 and Ludlow more openly, insinuate that his fondness for his 
 sister was of a criminal nature, I never could find that there 
 was any ground whatever for such a suspicion; nor does the 
 little that remains of their epistolary correspondence give it 
 the smallest countenance. Upon the whole, Charles II. 
 was a bad man, and a bad king: let us not palliate his 
 crimes, but neither let us adopt false or doubtful impu- 
 tations, for the purpose of making him a monster. 
 
 Whoever reviews the interesting period which we have 
 been discussing, upon the principle recommended in the out- 
 set of this chapter, will find that, from the consideration of 
 the past, to prognosticate the future, would at the moment of 
 Charles's demise, be no easy task. Between two persons, 
 one of whom should expect that the country would remain 
 sunk in slavery, the other, that the cause of freedom would 
 revive and triumph, it would be difficult to decide, whose 
 reasons were better supported, whose speculations the more 
 probable. I should guess that he who desponded, had looked 
 more at the state of the public, while he who was sanguine, 
 had fixed his eyes more attentively upon the person who was 
 about to mount the throne. Upon reviewing the two great 
 parties of the nation, one observation occurs very forcibly, 
 and that is, that the great strength of the whigfi consisted in 
 
328 
 
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 
 
 [1685. 
 
 their being able to brand their adversaries as favourers of 
 popery; that of the tories, (as far as their strength de- 
 pended upon opinion, and not merely upon the power of the 
 Crown,) in their finding colour to represent the whigs as 
 republicans. From this observation we may draw a further 
 inference, that, in proportion to the rashness of the crown, in 
 avowing and pressing forward the cause of popery, and to 
 the moderation and steadiness of the whigs, in adhering to 
 the form of monarchy, would be the chance of the people of 
 England, for changing an ignominious despotism, for glory, 
 liberty, and happiness. 
 
1685.] ACCESSION OF JAMES H. 329 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Accession of James II. — His declaration in council; acceptable to the 
 nation — Arbitrary designs of his reign — Former ministers continued — 
 Money transactions with France — Revenue levied without authority 
 of parliament — Persecution of dissenters — Character of Jeffreys — 
 The king's affectation of independence — Advances to the prince of 
 Orange — The primary object of this reign — Transactions in Scotland — 
 Severe persecutions there — Scottish parliament — Cruelties of govern- 
 ment — English parliament : its proceedings — Revenue — Votes con- 
 cerning religion — Bill for preservation of the king's person — Solicitude 
 for the church of England — Reversal of Stafford's attainder rejected — 
 Parliament adjourned — Character of the tories — Situation of the whigs. 
 
 Charles II. expired on the sixth of February 1684-5, 
 and on the same day his successor was proclaimed king in 
 London, with the usual formalities, by the title of James the 
 Second. The great influence which this prince was sup- 
 posed to have possessed in the government, during the latter 
 years of his brother's reign, and the expectation which was 
 entertained in consequence, that his measures, when monarch, 
 would be of the same character and complexion with those 
 which he was known to have highly approved, and of which 
 he was thought by many to have been the principal author, 
 when a subject, left little room for that spirit of speculation 
 which generally attends a demise of the crown. And thus 
 an event, which when apprehended a few years before had, 
 according to a strong expression of sir William Temple, 
 been looked upon as the end of the world, was now deemed to 
 be of small comparative importance. 
 
 Its tendency, indeed, was rather to insure perseverance 
 than to effect any change in the system which had been of 
 
330 
 
 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. 
 
 [1685c 
 
 late years pursued. As there are, however, some steps indis- 
 pensably necessary on the accession of a new prince to the 
 throne, to these the public attention was directed, and though 
 the character of James had been long so generally understood, 
 as to leave little doubt respecting the political maxims and 
 principles by which his reign would be governed, there was 
 probably much curiosity, as upon such occasions there always 
 is, with regard to the conduct he would pursue in matters of 
 less importance, and to the general language and behaviour 
 which he would adopt in his new situation. His first step 
 was, of course, to assemble the privy council, to whom he 
 spoke as follows: — 
 
 " Before I enter upon any other business, I think fit to 
 say something to you. Since it hath pleased Almighty God 
 to place me in this station, and I am now to succeed so good 
 and gracious a king, as well as so very kind a brother, I 
 think it fit to declare to you, that I will endeavour to follow 
 his example, and most especially in that of his great cle- 
 mency and tenderness to his people. I have been reported 
 to be a man for arbitrary power; but that is not the only 
 story that has been made of me: and I shall make it my 
 endeavour to preserve this government, both in church and 
 state, as it is now by law established. I know the principles 
 of the church of England are for monarchy, and the members 
 of it have shown themselves good and loyal subjects; there- 
 fore I shall alwa} r s take care to defend and support it. I 
 know, too, that the laws of England are sufficient to make 
 the king as great a monarch as I can wish; and as I shall 
 never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the 
 crown, so I shall never invade any man's property. I have 
 often heretofore ventured my life in defence of this nation; 
 and I shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its 
 just rights and liberties." 1 
 
 With this declaration the council were so highly satisfied, 
 that they supplicated his majesty to make it public, which 
 was accordingly done; and it is reported to have been re- 
 ceived with unbounded applause by the greater part of the 
 nation. Some, perhaps, there were, who did not think the 
 
 1 Kennett, iii. 420. 
 
1685.] TRIUMPH OF THE TORIES. 331 
 
 boast of having ventured his life very manly, and who, con- 
 sidering the transactions of the last years of Charles's reign,, 
 were not much encouraged by the promise of imitating that 
 monarch in clemency and tenderness to his subjects. To 
 these it might appear, that whatever there was of consolatory 
 in the king's disclaimer of arbitrary power and professed 
 attachment to the laws, was totally done away, as w^ell by the 
 consideration of what his majesty's notions of power and law 
 were, as by his declaration, that he would follow the example 
 of a predecessor, whose government had not only been marked 
 with the violation, in particular cases, of all the most sacred 
 laws of the realm, but had latterly, by the disuse of par- 
 liaments, in defiance of the statute of the sixteenth year of 
 his reign, stood upon a foundation radically and fundamentally 
 illegal. To others, it might occur, that even the promise to 
 the church of England, though express with respect to the 
 condition of it, which was no other than perfect acquiescence 
 in what the king deemed to be the true principles of monarchy, 
 was rather vague with regard to the nature or degree of 
 support to which the royal speaker might conceive himself 
 engaged. The words, although in any interpretation of 
 them they conveyed more than he possibly ever intended to 
 perform, did by no means express the sense which at that 
 time, by his friends, and afterwards by his enemies, was 
 endeavoured to be fixed on them. There was indeed a pro- 
 mise to support the establishment of the church, and con- 
 sequently the laws upon which that establishment imme- 
 diately rested; but by no means an engagement to maintain 
 all the collateral provisions which some of its more zealous 
 members might judge necessary for its security. 
 
 But whatever doubts or difficulties might be felt, few or 
 none were expressed. The whigs, as a vanquished party, 
 were either silent or not listened to, and the tories were in a 
 temper of mind which does not easily admit suspicion. They 
 were not more delighted with the victory they had obtained 
 over their adversaries, than with the additional stability 
 which, as they vainly imagined, the accession of the new 
 monarch was likely to give to their system. The truth is 
 that, his religion excepted, (and that objection they were 
 sanguine enough to consider as done away by a few gracious 
 words in favour of the church,) James was every way better 
 
332 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OP JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 suited to their purpose than his brother. They had enter- 
 tained continual apprehensions, not perhaps wholly unfounded, 
 of the late king's returning kindness to Monmouth, the con- 
 sequences of which could not easily be calculated; whereas, 
 every occurrence that had happened, as well as every circum- 
 stance in James's situation, seemed to make him utterly irre- 
 concileable with the whigs. Besides, after the reproach, as 
 well as alarm, which the notoriety of Charles's treacherous 
 character must so often have caused them, the very circum- 
 stance of having at their head a prince, of whom they could 
 with any colour hold out to their adherents that his word 
 was to be depended upon, was in itself a matter of triumph 
 and exultation. Accordingly the watchword of the party was 
 everywhere, We have the word of a king, and a word never 
 yet broken ; and to such a length was the spirit of adulation, 
 or perhaps the delusion, carried, that this royal declaration 
 was said to be a better 1 security for the liberty and religion 
 of the nation, than any which the law could devise. 1 
 
 The king, though much pleased, no doubt, with the popu- 
 larity which seemed to attend the commencement of his reign, 
 as a powerful medium for establishing the system of absolute 
 power, did not suffer himself, by any show of affection from 
 his people, to be diverted from his design of rendering his 
 government independent of them. To this design we must 
 look as the mainspring of all his actions at this period; for 
 with regard to the Roman-catholic religion, it is by no means 
 certain that he yet thought of obtaining for it anything more 
 than a complete toleration. With this view, therefore, he 
 could not take a more judicious resolution than that which he 
 had declared in his speech to the privy council, and to which 
 he seems, at this time, to have steadfastly adhered, of making 
 the government of his predecessor the model for his own. 
 He therefore continued in their offices, notwithstanding the 
 personal objections he might have to some of them, those 
 servants of the late king, during whose administration that 
 prince had been so successful in subduing his subjects, and 
 eradicating almost from the minds of Englishmen every sen- 
 timent of liberty. 
 
 Even the marquis of Halifax, who was supposed to have 
 
 1 Burnet. 
 
1685.] 
 
 NEW MINISTERS SUNDERLAND. 
 
 333 
 
 remonstrated against many of the late measures, and to have 
 been busy in recommending a change of system to Charles, 
 was continued in high employment by James, who told him 
 that, of all Ins past conduct, he should remember only his be- 
 haviour upon the exclusion bill, to which that nobleman had 
 made a zealous and distinguished opposition; a handsome ex- 
 pression, which has been the more noticed, as well because it 
 is almost the single instance of this prince's showing any 
 disposition to forget injuries, as on account of a delicacy 
 and propriety in the wording of it, by no means familiar 
 to him. 
 
 Lawrence Hyde, earl of Rochester, whom he appointed 
 lord treasurer, was in all respects calculated to be a fit in- 
 strument for the purposes then in view. Besides being upon 
 the worst terms with Halifax, in whom alone, of all his 
 ministers, James was likely to find any bias in favour of 
 popular principles, he was, both from prejudice of education, 
 and from interest, inasmuch as he had aspired to be the head 
 of the tories, a great favourer of those servile principles of the 
 church of England, which had been lately'so highly extolled 
 from the throne. His near relation to the duchess of York 
 might also be some recommendation, but his privity to the 
 late pecuniary transactions between the courts of Versailles 
 and London, and the cordiality with which he concurred in 
 them, were by far more powerful titles to his new master's 
 confidence. For it must be observed of this minister, as 
 well as of many others of his party, that his high notions, as 
 they are frequently styled, of power, regarded only the rela- 
 tion between the king and his subjects, and not that in which 
 he might stand with respect to foreign princes; so that, pro- 
 vided he could, by a dependence, however servile, upon 
 Louis XIV,, be placed above the control of his parliament 
 and people at home, he considered the honour of the crown 
 unsullied. 
 
 Robert Spencer, earl of Sunderland, who was continued as 
 secretary of state, had been at one period a supporter of the 
 exclusion bill, and had been suspected of having offered the 
 duchess of Portsmouth to obtain the succession to the crown 
 for her son, the duke of Richmond. Nay more, king James, 
 in his Memoirs, charges him with having intended, just at the 
 time of Charles's death, to send him into a second banish- 
 
334 
 
 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. 
 
 [1685. 
 
 ment; 1 but with regard to this last point, it appears evident 
 to me, that many things in those Memoirs, relative to this 
 earl, were written after James's abdication, and in the 
 greatest bitterness of spirit, when he was probably in a frame 
 of mind to believe anything against a person by whom he 
 conceived himself to have been basely deserted. The reap- 
 pointment, therefore, of this nobleman to so important an 
 office, is to be accounted for partly upon the general principle 
 above-mentioned, of making the new reign a mere continua- 
 tion of the former, and partly upon Sunderland's extraordi- 
 nary talents for ingratiating himself with persons in power, 
 and persuading them that he was the fittest instrument for 
 their purposes; a talent in which he seems to have surpassed 
 all the intriguing statesmen of his time, or perhaps of any 
 other. 
 
 An intimate connexion with the court of Versailles being 
 the principal engine by which the favourite project of abso- 
 lute monarchy was to be effected, James, for the purpose of 
 fixing and cementing that connexion, sent for M. de Barillon, 
 the French ambassador, the very day after his accession, and 
 entered into the most confidential discourse with him. He 
 explained to him his motives for intending to call a parlia- 
 ment, as well as his resolution to levy by authority the reve- 
 nue which his predecessor had enjoyed in virtue of a grant of 
 parliament which determined with his life. He made general 
 professions of attachment to Louis, declared that in all affairs 
 of importance it was his intention to consult that monarch, 
 and apologised, upon the ground of the urgency of the case, 
 for acting in the instance mentioned without his advice. 
 Money was not directly mentioned, owing, perhaps, to some 
 sense of shame upon that subject, which his brother had never 
 experienced; but lest there should be a doubt whether that 
 object were implied in the desire of support and protection, 
 Rochester was directed to explain the matter more fully, and 
 to give a more distinct interpretation of these general terms. 
 Accordingly, that minister waited the next morning upon 
 Barillon, and after having repeated and enlarged upon the 
 reasons for calling a parliament, stated, as an additional argu- 
 ment in defence of the measure, that without it his master 
 
 1 Macpherson's State Papers, i. 147. 
 
1685.] MONEY TRANSACTIONS WITH FRANCE. 335 
 
 would become too chargeable to the French king; adding, 
 however, that the assistance which might be expected from a 
 parliament, did not exempt him altogether from the necessity 
 of resorting to that prince for pecuniary aids; for that without 
 such, he would be at the mercy of his subjects, and that upon 
 this beginning would depend the whole fortune of the reign. 
 If Rochester actually expressed himself as Barillon relates, the 
 use intended to be made of parliament, cannot but cause the 
 most lively indignation, while it furnishes a complete answer 
 to the historians who accuse the parliaments of those days of 
 unseasonable parsimony in their grants to the Stuart kings; 
 for the grants of the people of England were not destined, it 
 seems, to enable their kings to oppose the power of France, 
 or even to be independent of her, but to render the influence 
 which Louis was resolved to preserve in this country, less 
 chargeable to him, by furnishing their quota to the support of 
 his royal dependant. 
 
 The French ambassador sent immediately a detailed account 
 of these conversations to his court, where, probably, they were 
 not received with the less satisfaction on account of the re^ 
 quest contained in them having been anticipated. Within a 
 very few days from that in which the latter of them had 
 passed, he was empowered to accompany the delivery of a 
 letter from his master, with the agreeable news of having re- 
 ceived from him bills of exchange to the amount of five hun- 
 dred thousand livres, to be used in whatever manner might 
 be convenient to the king of England's service. The account 
 which Barillon gives, of the manner in which this sum was 
 received, is altogether ridiculous: the king's eyes were full of 
 tears, and three of his ministers, Rochester, Sunderland, and 
 Godolphin, came severally to the French ambassador, to ex- 
 press the sense their master had of the obligation, in terms 
 the most lavish. Indeed, demonstrations of gratitude from 
 the king directly, as well as through his ministers, for this 
 supply, were such, as if they had been used by some unfortu- 
 nate individual, who, with his whole family, had been saved, 
 by the timely succour of some kind and powerful protector, 
 from a gaol and all its horrors, would be deemed rather too 
 strong than too weak. Barillon himself seems surprised when 
 he relates them; but imputes them to what was probably their 
 real cause, to the apprehensions that had been entertained, 
 

 336 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 (very unreasonable ones !) that the king of France might no 
 longer choose to interfere in the affairs of England, and con- 
 sequently that his support could not be relied on for the grand 
 object of assimilating this government to his own. 
 
 If such apprehensions did exist, it is probable that they 
 were chiefly owing to the very careless manner, to say the 
 least, in which Louis had of late fulfilled his pecuniary en- 
 gagements to Charles, so as to amount, in the opinion of the 
 English ministers, to an actual breach of promise. But the 
 circumstances were in some respects altered. The French 
 king had been convinced that Charles would never call a 
 parliament; nay, further perhaps, that if he did, he would not 
 be trusted by one; and considering him therefore entirely in 
 his power, acted from that principle in insolent minds which 
 makes them fond of ill-treating and insulting those whom they 
 have degraded to a dependence on them. But James would 
 probably be obliged at the commencement of a new reign to 
 call a parliament, and if well used by such a body, and aban- 
 doned by France, might give up his project of arbitrary 
 power, and consent to govern according to the law and con- 
 stitution. In such an event, Louis easi]y foresaw, that, in- 
 stead of an useful dependant, he might find upon the throne 
 of England a formidable enemy. Indeed, F this prince and his 
 ministers seem all along, with a sagacity that does them 
 credit, to have foreseen, and to have justly estimated, the dan- 
 gers to which they would be liable, if a cordial union should 
 ever take place between a king of England and his parliament, 
 and the British councils be directed by men enlightened and 
 warmed by the genuine principles of liberty. It was there- 
 fore an object of great moment to bind the new king, as early 
 as possible, to the system of dependency upon France; and 
 matter of no less triumph to the court of Versailles to have 
 retained him by so moderate a fee, than to that of London to 
 receive a sum which, though small, was thought valuable, as 
 an earnest of better wages and future protection. 
 
 It had for some time been Louis's favourite object to annex 
 to his dominion what remained of the Spanish Netherlands, as 
 well on account of their own intrinsic value, as to enable him 
 to destroy the United Provinces and the prince of Orange; 
 and this object Charles had bound himself, by treaty with 
 Spain, to oppose. In the joy, therefore, occasioned by this 
 
1685.] 
 
 MORE MONEY SOLICITED FROM LOUIS. 
 
 337 
 
 noble manner of proceeding, (for such it was called by all the 
 parties concerned,) the first step was to agree, without hesita- 
 tion, that Charles's treaty with Spain determined with his life; 
 a decision which, if the disregard that had been shown to it, 
 did not render the question concerning it nugatory, it would 
 be difficult to support upon any principles of national law or 
 justice. The manner in which the late king had conducted 
 himself upon the subject of this treaty, that is to say, the vio- 
 lation of it, without formally renouncing it, was gravely com- 
 mended, and stated to be no more than what might justly be 
 expected from him; but the present king was declared to be 
 still more free, and in no way bound by a treaty, from the 
 execution of w r hich his brother had judged himself to be suf- 
 ficiently dispensed. This appears to be a nice distinction, 
 and what that degree of obligation was, from which James 
 was exempt, but which had lain upon Charles, who neither 
 thought himself bound, nor was expected by others, to execute 
 the treaty, it is difficult to conceive. 
 
 This preliminary being adjusted, the meaning of wrhich, 
 through all this contemptible shuffling, was, that James, by 
 giving up all concern for the Spanish Netherlands, should be 
 at liberty to acquiesce in, or to second, whatever might be 
 the ambitious projects of the court of Versailles, it was deter- 
 mined that lord Churchill should be sent to Paris to obtain 
 further pecuniary aids. But such was the impression made 
 by the frankness and generosity of Louis, that there was no 
 question of discussing or capitulating, but every thing was 
 remitted to that prince, and to the information his ministers 
 might give him, respecting the exigency of affairs in England. 
 He who had so handsomely been beforehand, in granting the 
 assistance of ûve hundred thousand livres, was only to be 
 thanked for past, not importuned for future, munificence. 
 Thus ended, for the present, this disgusting scene of iniquity 
 and nonsense, in which all the actors seemed to vie with each 
 other in prostituting the sacred names of friendship, genero- 
 sity, and gratitude, in one of the meanest and most criminal 
 transactions which history records. 
 
 The principal parties in the business, besides the king 
 himself, to whose capacity, at least, if not to his situation, it 
 was more suitable, and lord Churchill, who acted as an inferior 
 agent, were Sunderland, Rochester, and Godolphin, all men 
 
 z 
 
338 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 of high rank and considerable abilities, but whose understand- 
 ings, as well as their principles, seem to have been corrupted 
 by the pernicious schemes in which they were engaged. 
 With respect to the last -mentioned nobleman in particular, it 
 is impossible, without pain, to see him engaged in such 
 transactions. With what self-humiliation must he not have 
 reflected upon them in subsequent periods of his life! How 
 little could Barillon guess that he was negotiating with one 
 w r ho w T as destined to be at the head of an administration, 
 which, in a few years, would send the same lord Churchill, 
 not to Paris, to implore Louis for succours towards enslaving 
 England, or to thank him for pensions to her monarch, but 
 to combine all Europe against him in the cause of liberty, to 
 rout his armies, to take his towns, to humble his pride, and 
 to shake to the foundation that fabric of power which it had 
 been the business of a long life to raise, at the expense of 
 every sentiment of tenderness to his subjects, and of justice 
 and good faith to foreign nations! It is with difficulty the 
 reader can persuade himself that the Godolphin and Churchill 
 here mentioned are the same persons who were afterwards 
 one in the cabinet, one in the field, the great conductors of 
 the war of the succession. How little do they appear in one 
 instance! how great in the other! And the investigation of 
 the cause to which this excessive difference is principally 
 owing, will produce a most useful lesson. Is the difference 
 to be attributed to any superiority of genius in the prince 
 whom they served in the latter period of their lives? Queen 
 Anne's capacity appears to have been inferior even to her 
 father's. Did they enjoy in a greater degree her favour and 
 confidence? The very reverse is the fact. But in one case they 
 were the tools of a king plotting against his people; in the 
 other, the ministers of a free government acting upon enlarged 
 principles, and with energies which no state that is not in 
 some degree republican can supply. How forcibly must the 
 contemplation of these men, in such opposite situations, teach 
 persons engaged in political life, that a free and popular 
 government is desirable, not only for the public good, but for 
 their own greatness and consideration, for every object of 
 generous ambition! 
 
 The king having, as has been related, first privately com- 
 municated his intentions to the French ambassador, issued 
 
1685.] CUSTOMS LEVIED ARBITRARILY. 339 
 
 proclamations for the meeting of parliament, and for levying, 
 upon his sole authority, the customs and other duties which 
 had constituted part of the late king's revenue, but to which, 
 the acts granting them having expired with the prince, James 
 was not legally entitled. He was advised by lord Guildford, 
 whom he had continued in the office of keeper of the great 
 seal, and who upon such a subject, therefore, was a person 
 likely to have the greatest weight, to satisfy himself with 
 directing the money to be kept in the exchequer for the dis- 
 posal of parliament, which was shortly to meet; and by others, 
 to take bonds from the merchants for the duties, to be paid 
 when parliament should legalize them. 1 But these expe- 
 dients were not suited to the king's views, who, as well on 
 account of his engagement with France, as from his own dis- 
 position, was determined to take no step that might indicate 
 an intention of governing by parliaments, or a consciousness 
 of his being dependent upon them for his revenue. He 
 adopted, therefore, the advice of Jeffreys, advice not result- 
 ing so much, probably, either from ignorance or violence of 
 disposition, as from his knowledge that it would be mo3t 
 agreeable to his master, and directed the duties to be paid as 
 in the former reign. It was pretended, that an interruption 
 in levying some of the duties might be hurtful to trade; but 
 as every difficulty of that kind was obviated by the expe- 
 dients proposed, this arbitrary and violent measure can with 
 no colour be ascribed to a regard to public convenience, nor 
 to any other motive than to a desire of reviving Charles I.'s 
 claims to the power of taxation, and of furnishing a most in- 
 telligible comment upon his speech to the council on the day 
 of his accession. It became evident what the king's notions 
 were, with respect to that regal prerogative from which he 
 professed himself determined never to depart, and to that 
 property which he would never invade. What were the re- 
 maining rights and liberties of the nation, which he was to 
 preserve, might be more difficult to discover; but that the 
 laws of England, in the royal interpretation of them, were 
 sufficient to make the king as great a monarch as he, or, in- 
 deed, any prince could desire, was a point that could not be 
 disputed. This violation of law was in itself most flagrant; 
 
 1 Life of Lord Keeper North. 
 
 z2 
 
840 HISTORY OF THE TtEIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 it was applied to a point well understood, and thought to 
 have been so completely settled by repeated and most ex- 
 plicit declarations of the legislature, that it must have been 
 doubtful whether even the most corrupt judges, if the ques- 
 tion had been tried, would have had the audacity to decide 
 it against the subject. But no resistance was made; nor did 
 the example of Hampden, which a half century before had 
 been so successful, and rendered that patriot's name so illus- 
 trious, tempt any one to emulate his fame; so completely had 
 the crafty and sanguinary measures of the late reign attained 
 the object to which they were directed, and rendered all men 
 either afraid or unwilling to exert themselves in the cause of 
 liberty. 
 
 On the other hand, addresses the most servile were daily 
 sent to the throne. That of the University of Oxford stated, 
 that the religion which they professed bound them to uncon- 
 ditional obedience to their sovereign, without restrictions or 
 limitations; and the Society of Barristers and Students of the 
 Middle Temple thanked his majesty for the attention he had 
 shown to the trade of the kingdom, concerning which, and its 
 balance, (and upon this last article they laid particular stress,) 
 they seemed to think themselves peculiarly called upon to de- 
 liver their opinion. But whatever might be their knowledge 
 in matters of trade, it was at least equal to that which these 
 addressers showed in the laws and constitution of their country, 
 since they boldly affirmed the king's right to levy the duties, 
 and declared that it had never been disputed but by persons 
 engaged in what they were pleased to call rebellion against his 
 royal father. The address concluded with a sort of prayer, 
 that all his majesty's subjects might be as good lawyers as 
 themselves, and disposed to acknowledge the royal preroga- 
 tive in all its extent. 
 
 If these addresses are remarkable for their servility, that 
 of the gentlemen and freeholders of the county of Suffolk was 
 no less so for the spirit of party violence that was displayed 
 in it. They would take care, they said, to choose repre- 
 sentatives who should no more endure those who had been 
 for the Exclusion Bill, than the last parliament had the ab- 
 horrers of the association; and thus not only endeavoured to 
 keep up his majesty's resentment against a part of their 
 fellow-subjects, but engaged themselves to imitate, for the 
 
 
1685.] SERVILE ADDRESSES. 341 
 
 purpose of retaliation, that part of the conduct of their adver^ 
 saries, which they considered as most illegal and oppressive. 1 
 It is a remarkable circumstance, that among all the adula-? 
 tory addresses of this time, there is not to be found, in any 
 one of them, any declaration of disbelief in the popish plot, or 
 any charge upon the late parliament for having prosecuted it, 
 though it could not but be well known that such topics would, 
 of all others, be most agreeable to the court. Hence we may 
 collect that the delusion on this subject was by no means at 
 an end, and that they who, out of a desire to render history 
 conformable to the principles of poetical justice, attribute the 
 unpopularity and downfall of the whigs to the indignation ex- 
 cited by their furious and sanguinary prosecution of the plot, 
 are egregiously mistaken. If this had been in any degree the 
 prevailing sentiment, it is utterly unaccountable that, so far 
 from its appearing in any of the addresses of these times, this 
 most just ground of reproach upon the whig party, and the 
 parliament in which they had had the superiority, was the 
 only one omitted in them. The fact appears to have been the 
 very reverse of what such historians suppose, and that the 
 activity of the late parliamentary leaders, in prosecuting the 
 popish plot, was the principal circumstance which reconciled 
 the nation, for a time, to their other proceedings; that their 
 conduct in that business (now so justly condemned) was the 
 grand engine of their power, and that when that failed, they 
 were soon overpowered by the united forces of bigotry and 
 corruption. They were hated by a great part of the nation, 
 not for their crimes, but for their virtues. To be above cor- 
 ruption is always odious to the corrupt, and to entertain more 
 enlarged and juster notions of philosophy and government, is 
 often a cause of alarm to the narrow-minded and supersti- 
 tious. In those days particularly, it was obvious to refer to 
 the confusion, greatly exaggerated, of the times of the com- 
 monwealth; and it was an excellent watchword of alarm, to 
 accuse every lover of law and liberty, of designs to revive the 
 tragical scene which had closed the life of the first Charles. 
 In this spirit, therefore, the Exclusion Bill, and the alleged 
 conspiracies of Sidney and Russell, were, as might naturally 
 be expected, the chief charges urged against the whigs; but 
 
 1 Rapiu. 
 
342 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 their conduct on the subject of the popish plot was so far from 
 being the cause of the hatred borne to them, that it was not 
 even used as a topic of accusation against them. 
 
 In order to keep up that spirit in the nation, which was 
 thought to be manifested in the addresses, his majesty ordered 
 the declaration, to which allusion was made in the last 
 chapter, to be published, interwoven with a history of the 
 Rye House plot, which is said to have been drawn by Dr. 
 Spratt, bishop of Rochester. The principal drift of this pub- 
 lication was, to load the memory of Sidney and Russell, and 
 to blacken the character of the duke of Monmouth, by wickedly 
 confounding the consultations holden by them, with the plot 
 for assassinating the late king, and in this object it seems in 
 a great measure to have succeeded. He also caused to be 
 published an attestation of his brother's having died a Roman 
 catholic, together with two papers, drawn up by him, in 
 favour of that persuasion. This is generally considered to have 
 been a very ill-advised instance of zeal; but probably James 
 thought, that at a time when people seemed to be so in love 
 with his power, he might safely venture to indulge himself 
 in a display of his attachment to his religion; and perhaps, 
 too, it might be thought good policy to show that a prince, 
 who had been so highly complimented as Charles had been, 
 for the restoration and protection of the church, had, in truth, 
 been a catholic, and thus to inculcate an opinion, that the 
 church of England might not only be safe, but highly favoured, 
 under the reign of a popish prince. 
 
 Partly from similar motives, and partly to gratify the 
 natural vindictiveness of his temper, he persevered in a most 
 cruel persecution of the Protestant dissenters, upon the most 
 frivolous pretences. The courts of justice, as in Charles's 
 days, were instruments equally ready, either for seconding 
 the policy or for gratifying the bad passions of the monarch; 
 and Jeffreys, whom the late king had appointed chief justice 
 of England a little before Sidney's trial, was a man entirely 
 agreeable to the temper, and suitable to the purposes, of the 
 present government. He was thought not to be very learned 
 in his profession; but what might be wanting in knowledge 
 he made up in positiveness; and, indeed, whatever might be 
 the difficulties in questions between one subject and another, 
 the fashionable doctrine, which prevailed at that time, of sup- 
 
1685.] PERSECUTION OF BAXTER. 343 
 
 porting the king's prerogative in its full extent, and without 
 restriction or limitation, rendered, to such as espoused it, all 
 that branch of law which is called constitutional extremely 
 easy and simple. He was as submissive and mean to those 
 above him as he was haughty and insolent to those who 
 were in any degree in his power; and if in his own conduct 
 he did not exhibit a very nice regard for morality, or even 
 for decency, he never failed to animadvert upon, and to 
 punish, the most slight deviation in others with the utmost 
 severity, especially if they were persons whom he suspected 
 to be no favourites of the court. 
 
 Before this magistrate was brought for trial, by a jury suffi- 
 ciently prepossessed in favour of tory politics, the Rev. Richard 
 Baxter, a dissenting minister, a pious and learned man, of 
 exemplary character, always remarkable for his attachment to 
 monarchy, and for leaning to moderate measures in the 
 differences between the church and those of his persuasion. 
 The pretence for this prosecution was, a supposed reference 
 of some passages in one of his works to the bishops of the 
 church of England; a reference which was certainly not 
 intended by him, and which could not have been made out to 
 any jury that had been less prejudiced, or under any other 
 direction than that of Jeffreys. The real motive was, the desire 
 of punishing an eminent dissenting teacher, whose reputation 
 was high among his sect, and who was supposed to favour 
 the political opinions of the whigs. He was found guilty, 
 and Jeffreys, in passing sentence upon him, loaded him with 
 the coarsest reproaches and bitterest taunts. He called him 
 sometimes, by way of derision, a saint, sometimes, in plainer 
 terms, an old rogue; and classed this respectable divine, to 
 wdiom the only crime imputed was the having spoken disre- 
 spectfully of the bishops of a communion to which he did not 
 belong, with the infamous Oates, w T ho had been lately con- 
 victed of perjury. He finished with declaring, that it was 
 matter of public notoriety that there was a formed design to 
 ruin the king and the nation, in which this old man was the 
 principal incendiary. Nor is it improbable that this declara- 
 tion, absurd as it was, might gain belief at a time when the 
 credulity of the triumphant party was at its height. 
 
 Of this credulity it seems to be no inconsiderable testimony, 
 that some affected nicety which James had shown with regard 
 
344 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 to the ceremonies to be used towards the French ambassador, 
 was highly magnified, and represented to be an indication of 
 the different tone that was to be taken by the present king, in 
 regard to foreign powers, and particularly to the court of 
 Versailles. The king was represented as a prince eminently 
 jealous of the national honour, and determined to preserve 
 the balance of power in Europe, by opposing the ambitious 
 projects of France at the very time when he was supplicating 
 Louis to be his pensioner, and expressing the most extrava- 
 gant gratitude for having been accepted as such. From the 
 information which we now have, it appears that his applica- 
 tions to Louis for money were incessant, and that the difficulties 
 were all on the side of the French court. 1 Of the historians 
 who wrote prior to the inspection of the papers in the foreign 
 office in France, Burnet is the only one who seems to have 
 known that James's pretensions of independency with respect 
 to the French king, were (as he terms them) only a show; 
 but there can now be no reason to doubt the truth of the 
 anecdote which he relates, that Louis soon after told the duke 
 of Villeroy, 1 that if James showed any apparent uneasiness 
 concerning the balance of power (and there is some reason to 
 suppose he did) in his conversations with the Spanish and 
 other foreign ambassadors, his intention was, probably, to 
 alarm the court of Versailles, and thereby to extort pecuniary 
 assistance to a greater extent; while, on the other hand, 
 Louis, secure in the knowledge that his views of absolute 
 power must continue him in dependence upon France, seems 
 to have refused further supplies, and even in some measure to 
 have withdrawn those which had been stipulated, as a mark 
 of his displeasure with his dependant, for assuming a higher 
 tone than he thought becoming. 
 
 Whether with a view of giving some countenance to those 
 who were praising him upon the above-mentioned topic, or 
 from what other motive it is now not easy to conjecture, James 
 seems to have wished to be upon apparent good terms, at 
 least, with the prince of Orange; and after some corre- 
 spondence with that prince concerning the protection afforded 
 by him and the states-general to Monmouth, and other 
 obnoxious persons, it appears that he declared himself, in 
 
 1 Vide Burnet, vol. ii. p. 302. 
 
1685.] james's relations with louis. 345 
 
 consequence of certain explanations and concessions, perfectly 
 satisfied. It is to be remarked, however, that he thought it 
 necessary to give the French ambassador an account of this 
 transaction, and in a manner to apologize to him for entering 
 into any sort of terms with a son-in-law, who was supposed 
 to be hostile in disposition to the French king. He assured 
 Barillon that a change of system on the part of the prince of 
 Orange in regard to Louis, should be a condition of his recon- 
 ciliation : he afterwards informed him that the prince of 
 Orange had answered him satisfactorily in all other respects, 
 but had not taken notice of his wish that he should connect 
 himself with France; but never told him that he had, not- 
 withstanding the prince's silence on that material point, 
 expressed himself completely satisfied with him. That a 
 proposition to the prince of Orange, to connect himself in 
 politics with Louis would, if made, have been rejected, in the 
 manner in which the king's account to Barillon implies that 
 it was, there can be no doubt; but whether James ever had 
 the assurance to make it, is more questionable; for as he 
 evidentally acted disingenuously with the ambassador, in con- 
 cealing from him the complete satisfaction he had expressed of 
 the prince of Orange's present conduct, 1 it is not unreasonable 
 to suppose that he deceived him still further, and pretended 
 to have made an application, which he had never hazarded. 
 However, the ascertaining of this fact is by no means neces- 
 sary for the illustration, either of the general history or of 
 James's particular character, since it appears, that the propo- 
 sition, if made, was rejected; and James is, in any case,, 
 equally convicted of insincerity, the only point in question 
 being, whether he deceived the French ambassador, in regard 
 to the fact of his having made the proposition, or to the sen- 
 timents he expressed upon its being refused. Nothing serves 
 more to show the dependence in which he considered himself 
 to be upon Louis than these contemptible shifts to which he 
 condescended, for the purposes of explaining and apologizing 
 for such parts of his conduct as might be supposed to be less 
 agreeable to that monarch than the rest. An English parlia- 
 ment acting upon constitutional principles, and the prince of 
 Orange, were the two enemies whom Louis most dreaded; 
 
 1 Dairymple's Mem. ii. 11G. 
 
346 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 and, accordingly, whenever James found it necessary to make 
 approaches to either of them, an apology was immediately to 
 be offered to the French ambassador, to which truth some- 
 times and honour was always sacrificed. 
 
 Mr. Hume says, the king found himself, by degrees, under 
 the necessity of falling into an union with the French 
 monarch, who could alone assist him in promoting the catholic 
 religion in England. But when that historian wrote, those 
 documents had not been made public, from which the account 
 of the communications with Barillon has been taken, and by 
 which it appears that a connexion with France was, as well 
 in point of time as in importance, the first object of his reign, 
 and that the immediate specific motive to that connexion was 
 the same as that of his brother; the desire of rendering him- 
 self independent of parliament, and absolute, not that of esta- 
 blishing popery in England, which was considered as a more 
 remote contingency. That this was the case is evident from 
 all the circumstances of the transaction, and especially from 
 the zeal with which he was served in it by ministers who 
 were never suspected of any leaning towards popery, and not 
 one of whom (Sunderland excepted) could be brought to the 
 measures that w ere afterwards taken in favour of that reli- 
 gion. It is the more material to attend to this distinction, 
 because the tory historians, especially such of them as are not 
 Jacobites, have taken much pains to induce us to attribute 
 the violences and illegalities of this reign to James's religion, 
 which was peculiar to him, rather than to that desire of 
 absolute power, which so many other princes have had, have, 
 and always will have, in common with him. The policy of such 
 misrepresentation is obvious. If this reign is to be considered 
 as a period insulated, as it were, and unconnected with the 
 general course of history, and if the events of it are to be 
 attributed exclusively to the particular character and particular 
 attachments of the monarch, the sole inference will be, that we 
 must not have a catholic for our king; whereas, if we con- 
 sider it, which history well warrants us to do, as a part of that 
 system which had been pursued by all the Stuart kings, as well 
 prior as subsequent to the restoration, the lesson which it 
 affords is very different, as well as far more instructive. We 
 are taught, generally, the dangers Englishmen will always be 
 liable to, if, from favour to a prince upon the throne, or from a 
 
1685.] SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT. 347 
 
 confidence, however grounded, that his views are agreeable to 
 our own notions of the constitution, we in any considerable 
 degree abate of that vigilant and unremitting jealousy of the 
 power of the crown, which can alone secure to us the effect of 
 those wise laws that have been provided for the benefit of the 
 subject; and still more particularly, that it is in vain to think 
 of making a compromise with power, and by yielding to it in 
 other points, preserving some favourite object, such, forinstance, 
 as the church in James's case, from its grasp. 
 
 Previous to meeting his English parliament, James directed 
 a parliament which had been summoned in the preceding 
 reign, to assemble at Edinburgh, and appointed the duke of 
 Queensbury his commissioner. This appointment is, in itself, 
 a strong indication that the king's views, with regard to 
 Scotland at least, were similar to those which I have ascribed 
 to him in England; and that they did not at that time extend 
 to the introduction of popery, but were altogether directed to 
 the establishment of absolute power as the end, and to the 
 support of an episcopal church, upon the model of the church 
 of England, as the means. For Queensbury had explained 
 himself to his majesty in the fullest manner upon the subject 
 of religion; and while he professed himself to be ready (as, 
 indeed, his conduct in the late reign had sufficiently proved) 
 to go any length in supporting royal power and in persecuting 
 the presbyterians, had made it a condition of his services, that 
 he might understand from his majesty that there was no inten- 
 tion of changing the established religion; for if such was the 
 object, he could not make any one step with him in that 
 matter. James received this declaration most kindly, assured 
 him he had no such intention, and that he would have a par- 
 liament, to which he, Queensbury, should go as commissioner, 
 and giving all possible assurances in the matter of religion, 
 get the revenue to be settled, and such other laws to be passed 
 as might be necessary for the public safety. With these 
 promises the duke was not only satisfied at the time, but de- 
 clared, at a subsequent period, that they had been made in so 
 frank and hearty a manner, as made him conclude that it was 
 impossible the king should be acting a part. And this noble- 
 man was considered, and is handed down to us by contempo- 
 rary writers, as a man of a penetrating genius, nor has it ever 
 been the national character of the country to which he be- 
 
348 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 longed, to be more liable to be imposed upon than the rest of 
 mankind. 
 
 The Scottish parliament met on the 23rd of April, and 
 was opened by the commissioner, with the following letter 
 from the king: — 
 
 " My lords and gentlemen, — The many experiences we 
 have had of the loyalty and exemplary forwardness of that 
 our ancient kingdom, by their representatives in parliament 
 assembled, in the reign of our deceased and most entirely be- 
 loved brother of ever blessed memory, made us desirous to 
 call you at this time, in the beginning of our reign, to give 
 you an opportunity, not only of showing your duty to us in 
 the same manner, but likewise of being exemplary to others 
 in your demonstrations of affection to our person and com- 
 pliance with our desires, as you have most eminently been in 
 times past, to a degree never to be forgotten by us, nor (we 
 hope) to be contradicted by your future practices. That 
 which we are at this time to propose unto you is what is as 
 necessary for your safety as our service, and what has a ten- 
 dency more to secure your own privileges and properties than 
 the aggrandizing our power and authority (though in it con- 
 sists the greatest security of your rights and interests, these 
 never having been in danger, except when the royal power 
 was brought too low to protect them), which now we are re- 
 solved to maintain, in its greatest lustre, to the end we may 
 be the more enabled to defend and protect your religion as 
 established by law, and your rights and properties (which was 
 our design in calling this parliament) against fanatical con- 
 trivances, murderers, and assassins, who having no fear of God, 
 more than honour for us, have brought you into such dif- 
 ficulties as only the blessing of God upon the steady resolu- 
 tions and actings of our said dearest royal brother, and those 
 employed by him, (in prosecution of the good and wholesome 
 laws, by you heretofore offered,) could have saved you from 
 the most horrid confusions and inevitable ruin. Nothing 
 has been left unattempted by those wild and inhuman traitors 
 for endeavouring to overturn your peace; and therefore we 
 have good reason to hope that nothing will be wanting in you 
 to secure yourselves and us from their outrages and violence 
 in time coming, and to take care that such conspirators meet 
 with their just deservings, so as others may thereby be deter- 
 
1685.] the king's letter. 349 
 
 red from courses so little agreeable to religion, or their duty 
 and allegiance to us. These things we considered to be of so 
 great importance to our royal, as well as the universal, interest 
 of that our kingdom, that we were fully resolved, in person, 
 to have proposed the needful remedies to you. But things 
 having so fallen out as render this impossible for us, we have 
 now thought fit to send our right trusty and right entirely 
 beloved cousin and councillor, William duke of Queensbury, 
 to be our commissioner amongst you, of whose abilities and 
 qualifications we have reason to be fully satisfied, and of 
 whose faithfulness to us, and zeal for our interest, we have 
 had signal proofs in the times of our greatest difficulties. 
 Him we have fully intrusted in all things relating to our 
 service, and your own prosperity and happiness, and there- 
 fore you are to give him entire trust and credit, as you now 
 see w^e have done, from whose prudence and your most dutiful 
 affection to us, we have full confidence of your entire com- 
 pliance and assistance in all those matters, wherein he is in- 
 structed as aforesaid. We do therefore not only recommend 
 unto you that such things be done as are necessary in this 
 juncture for your own peace, and the support of our royal 
 interest, of which we had so much experience when amongst 
 you, that we cannot doubt of your full and ample expressing 
 the same on this occasion, by which the great concern w^e 
 have in you, our ancient and kindly people, may still increase, 
 and you may transmit your loyal actions (as examples of 
 duty) to your posterity. In full confidence whereof we do 
 assure you of your royal favour and protection in all your con- 
 cerns, and so we bid you heartily farewell." 
 
 This letter deserves the more attention, because, as the 
 proceedings of the Scotch parliament, according to a remark- 
 able expression in the letter itself, were intended to be an 
 example to others, there is the greatest reason to suppose the 
 matter of it must have been maturely weighed and considered. 
 His majesty first compliments the Scotch parliament upon 
 their peculiar loyalty and dutiful behaviour in past times, 
 meaning, no doubt, to contrast their conduct with that of 
 those English parliaments who had passed the exclusion bill, 
 the disbanding act, the habeas corpus act, and other measures 
 hostile to his favourite principles of government. He states 
 the granting of an independent revenue, and the supporting 
 
350 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 the prerogative in its greatest lustre, if not the aggrandizing 
 of it, to be necessary for the preservation of their religion, 
 established by law, (that is, the protestant episcopacy,) as well 
 as for the security of their properties against fanatical assas- 
 sins and murderers; thus emphatically announcing a complete 
 union of interests between the crown and the church. He 
 then bestows a complete and unqualified approbation of the 
 persecuting measures of the last reign, in which he had borne 
 so great a share; and to those measures, and to the steadiness 
 with which they had been persevered in, he ascribes the 
 escape of both church and state from the fanatics, and ex- 
 presses his regret that he could not be present, to propose in 
 person the other remedies of a similar nature, which he 
 recommended as needful in the present conjuncture. 
 
 Now it is proper' in this place, to inquire into the nature 
 of the measures thus extolled, as well for the purpose of 
 elucidating the characters of the king and his Scottish minis- 
 ters, as for that of rendering more intelligible the subsequent 
 proceedings of the parliament, and the other events which 
 soon after took place in that kingdom. Some general notions 
 may be formed of that course of proceedings which, according 
 to his majesty's opinion, had been so laudably and resolutely 
 pursued during the late reign, from the circumstances alluded 
 to in the preceding chapter, when it is understood that the 
 sentences of Argyle and Laurie of Blackwood were not de- 
 tached instances of oppression, but rather a sample of the 
 general system of administration. The covenant, which had 
 been so solemnly taken by the whole kingdom, and among 
 the rest by the king himself, had been declared to be unlaw- 
 ful, and a refusal to abjure it had been made subject to the 
 severest penalties. Episcopacy, which was detested by a 
 great majority of the nation, had been established, and all 
 public exercise of religion, in the forms to which the people 
 w r ere most attached, had been prohibited. The attendance 
 upon field conventicles had been made highly penal, and the 
 preaching at them capital; by which means, according to the 
 computation of a late writer, no less remarkable for the 
 accuracy of his facts than for the force and justness of his 
 reasonings, at least seventeen thousand persons in one dis- 
 trict were involved in criminality, and became the objects of 
 persecution. After this, letters had been issued by govern- 
 
1685.] MEASURES OF PERSECUTION. 351 
 
 ment, forbidding the intereommuning with persons who had 
 neglected or refused to appear before the privy council, when 
 cited for the above crimes; a proceeding, by which not only 
 all succour or assistance to such persons, but, according to the 
 strict sense of the word made use of, all intercourse with 
 them, was rendered criminal, and subjected him who disobeyed 
 the prohibition to the same penalties, whether capital or 
 others, which were affixed to the alleged crimes of the party 
 with whom he had intercommuned. 1 
 
 These measures not proving effectual for the purpose for 
 which they were intended, or, as some say, the object of 
 Charles IL 's government being to provoke an insurrection, a 
 demand was made upon the landholders, in the district sup- 
 posed to be most disaffected, of bonds, whereby they were to 
 become responsible for their wives, families, tenants, and 
 servants; and likewise for the w r ives, families, and servants 
 of their tenants, and finally, for all persons living upon their 
 estates; that they should not withdraw from the church, fre- 
 quent or preach at conventicles, nor give any succour, or 
 have any intercourse with persons with whom it was for- 
 bidden to intercommune; and the penalties attached to the 
 breach of this engagement, the keeping of which was obvi- 
 ously out of the power of him who was required to make it, 
 were to be the same as those, whether capital or other, to 
 which the several persons, for whom he engaged, might be 
 liable. The landholders, not being willing to subscribe to 
 their own destruction, refused to execute the bonds, and this 
 was thought sufficient grounds for considering the district to 
 which they belonged as in a state of rebellion. English and 
 Irish armies were ordered to the frontiers ; a train of artillery, 
 and the militia, were sent into the district itself; and six 
 thousand Highlanders, who were let loose upon its inhabi- 
 tants, to exercise every species of pillage and plunder, were 
 connived at, or rather encouraged, in excesses of a still more 
 atrocious nature. 2 
 
 The bonds being still refused, the government had recourse 
 to an expedient of a most extraordinary nature, and issued 
 what the Scotch called a writ of Lawburrows, against the 
 
 1 Laing's Hist. vol. iv. 34. 60. 74. Woodrow. 
 
 ? Buruet. Woodrow. Laing, iv. 8-3. 
 
352 
 
 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. 
 
 [168c 
 
 whole district. This writ of Lawburrows is somewhat 
 analogous to what we call swearing the peace against any one, 
 and had hitherto been supposed, as the other is with us, to 
 be applicable to the disputes of private individuals, and to 
 the apprehensions which, in consequence of such disputes, 
 they may mutually entertain of each other. A government 
 swearing the peace against its subjects was a new spectacle; 
 but if a private subject, under fear of another, hath a right 
 to such a security, how much more the government itself? was 
 thought an unanswerable argument. Such are the sophis- 
 tries which tyrants deem satisfactory. Thus are they will- 
 ing even to descend from their loftiness into the situation of 
 subjects or private men, when it is for the purpose of ac- 
 quiring additional powers of persecution; and thus truly 
 formidable and terrific are they, when they pretend alarm 
 and fear. By these writs, the persons against whom they 
 were directed were bound, as in case of the former bonds, 
 to conditions which were not in their power to fulfil, such as 
 the preventing of conventicles and the like, under such penal- 
 ties as the privy council might inflict, and a disobedience to 
 them was followed by outlawry and confiscation. 
 
 The conduct of the duke of Lauderdale, who was the chief 
 actor in these scenes of violence and iniquity, was completely 
 approved and justified at court; but, in consequence, probably, 
 of the state of politics in England, at a time when the whigs 
 were strongest in the house of commons, some of these 
 grievances were in part redressed, and the Highlanders, and 
 writs of Lawburrows, were recalled. But the country was 
 -still treated like a conquered country. The Highlanders 
 were replaced by an army of ûve thousand regulars, and 
 garrisons were placed in private houses. The persecution of 
 conventicles continued; and ample indemnity was granted 
 for every species of violence that might be exercised by those 
 employed to suppress them. In this state of things, the 
 assassination and murder of Sharp, archbishop of St. Andrews, 
 by a troop of fanatics, who had been driven to madness by 
 the oppression of Carmichael, one of that prelate's instru- 
 ments, while it gave an additional spur to the vindictive tem- 
 per of the government, was considered by it as a justification 
 for every mode and degree of cruelty and persecution. The 
 outrage committed by a few individuals was imputed to the 
 whole fanatic sect, as the government termed them, or, in 
 
1685.] INSURRECTION OF BOTHWELL BRIDGE. 353 
 
 other words, to a description of people which composed a 
 great majority of the population in the Lowlands of Scotland; 
 and those who attended field or armed conventicles, were 
 ordered to be indiscriminately massacred. 
 
 By such means an insurrection was at last produced, which, 
 from the weakness, or, as some suppose, from the wicked 
 policy of an administration eager for confiscations, and de- 
 sirous of such a state of the country as might, in some mea- 
 sure, justify their course of government, made such a pro- 
 gress that the insurgents became masters of Glasgow and 
 the country adjacent. To quell these insurgents, who, undis- 
 ciplined as they were, had defeated Graham, afterwards 
 viscount Dundee, the duke of Monmouth was sent with an 
 army from England; but, lest the generous mildness of his 
 nature should prevail, he had sealed orders, which he was not 
 to open till in sight of the rebels, enjoining him not to treat 
 with them, but to fall upon them without any previous nego- 
 tiation. In pursuance of these orders, the insurgents were 
 attacked at Bothwell bridge, where, though they were 
 entirely routed and dispersed, yet because those who surren- 
 dered at discretion were not put to death, and the army, by 
 the strict enforcing of discipline, were prevented from plun- 
 der and other outrages, it was represented by James, and in 
 some degree even by the king, that Monmouth had acted as 
 if he had meant rather to put himself at the head of the 
 fanatics than to repel them, and were inclined rather to court 
 their friendship than to punish their rebellion. All com- 
 plaints against Lauderdale were dismissed, his power con- 
 firmed, and an act of indemnity, w^hich had been procured at 
 Monmouth's intercession, was so clogged with exceptions, as 
 to be of little use to any but to the agents of tyranny. Several 
 persons, who were neither directly nor indirectly concerned 
 in the murder of the archbishop, were executed as an expia- 
 tion for that offence; 1 but many more were obliged to com- 
 pound for their lives, by submitting to the most rapacious 
 extortion, which at this particular period seems to have been 
 the engine of oppression most in fashion, and w T hich was 
 extended, not only to those who had been in any way con- 
 cerned in the insurrection, but to those who had neglected to 
 
 i Laiug, iv. 1G4. Woodrow, ii. 87. 90. 
 
 A A 
 
354 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 attend the standard of the king, when displayed against what 
 was styled, in the usual insulting language of tyrants, a most 
 unnatural rebellion. 
 
 The quiet produced by such means was, as might be ex- 
 pected, of no long duration. Enthusiasm was increased by 
 persecution, and the fanatic preachers found no difficulty in 
 persuading their flocks to throw off all allegiance to a govern- 
 ment which afforded them no protection. The king was 
 declared to be an apostate from the government, a tyrant, and 
 an usurper; and Cargill, one of the most enthusiastic among 
 the preachers, pronounced a formal sentence of excommunica- 
 tion against him, his brother the duke of York, and others, 
 their ministers and abettors. This outrage upon majesty, 
 together with an insurrection, contemptible in point of num- 
 bers and strength, in which Cameron, another field-preacher, 
 had been killed, furnished a pretence which was by no means 
 neglected, for new cruelties and executions; but neither death 
 nor torture were sufficient to subdue the minds of Çargill and 
 his intrepid followers. They all gloried in their sufferings; nor 
 could the meanest of them be brought to purchase their lives 
 by a retractation of their principles, or even by any expression 
 that might be construed into an approbation of their perse- 
 cutors. The effect of this heroic constancy upon the minds 
 of their oppressors, was to persuade them not to lessen the 
 numbers of executions, but to render them more private; 1 
 whereby they exposed the true character of their government, 
 which was not severity, but violence; not justice, but ven- 
 geance: for example being the only legitimate end of punish- 
 ment, where that is likely to encourage rather than to deter, 
 (as the government in these instances seems to have appre- 
 hended,) and consequently to prove more pernicious than 
 salutary, every punishment inflicted by the magistrate is 
 cruelty, every execution murder. The rage of punishment 
 did not stop even here, but questions were put to persons, 
 and in many instances to persons under torture, who had not 
 been proved to have been in any of the insurrections, whether 
 they considered the archbishop's assassination as murder, the 
 rising at Bothwell bridge rebellion, and Charles a lawfid king. 
 The refusal to answer these questions, or the answering of 
 
 1 Woodrow,ii. 189. 
 
1685.] ACT OF SUCCESSION AND TEST. 3oO 
 
 them in an unsatisfactory manner, was deemed a proof of 
 guilt, and immediate execution ensued. 
 
 These last proceedings had taken place while James him- 
 self had the government in his hands, and under his imme- 
 diate directions. Not long after, and when the exclusionists 
 in England were supposed to be entirely defeated, was passed 
 (James being the king's commissioner,) the famous bill of 
 succession, declaring that no difference of religion, nor any 
 statute or law grounded upon such, or any other pretence, 
 could defeat the hereditary right of the heir to the crown, 
 and that to propose any limitation upon the future adminis- 
 tration of such heir was high treason. But the protestant 
 religion was to be secured; for those who were most obse- 
 quious to the court, and the most willing and forward instru- 
 ments of its tyranny, were, nevertheless, zealous protestants. 
 A test was therefore framed for this purpose, which was 
 imposed upon all persons exercising any civil or military 
 functions whatever, the royal family alone excepted; but to 
 the declaration of adherence to the protestant religion was 
 added a recognition of. the king's supremacy in ecclesiastical 
 matters, and a complete renunciation in civil concerns of 
 every right belonging to a free subject. An adherence to the 
 protestant religion, according to the confession of it referred 
 to in the test, seemed to some inconsistent with the acknow- 
 ledgment of the king's supremacy and that clause of the oath 
 which related to civil matters, inasmuch as it declared against 
 endeavouring at any alteration in the church or state, seemed 
 incompatible with the duties of a counsellor or a member of 
 parliament. Upon these grounds the earl of Argyle, in taking 
 the oath, thought fit to declare as follows: — 
 
 "I have considered the test, and I am very desirous to 
 give obedience as far as I can. I am confident the parlia- 
 ment never intended to impose contradictory oaths; therefore 
 I think no man can explain it but for himself. Accordingly 
 I take it, as far as it is consistent with itself and the pro- 
 testant religion. And I do declare, that I mean not to bind 
 up myself in my station, and in a lawful way, to wish and 
 endeavour any alteration I think to the advantage of the 
 church or state, not repugnant to the protestant religion and 
 my loyalty. And this I understand as a part of the oath." 
 And for this declaration, though unnoticed at the time, he 
 
 a a 2 
 
356 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 was in a few days afterwards committed, and shortly after 
 sentenced to die. 1 Nor was the test applied only to those for 
 whom it had been originally instituted, but by being offered 
 to those numerous classes of people who were within the 
 reach of the late severe criminal laws, as an alternative for 
 death or confiscation, it might fairly be said to be imposed 
 upon the greater part of the country. 
 
 Not long after these transactions, James took his final leave 
 of the government, and in his parting speech recommended, 
 in the strongest terms, the support of the church. This- 
 gracious expression, the sincerity of which seemed to be 
 evinced by his conduct to the conventiclers, and the severity 
 with which he had enforced the test, obtained him a testi- 
 monial from the bishops of his affection to their protestant 
 church; a testimonial to which, upon the principle that they 
 are the best friends to the church who are most willing to 
 persecute such as dissent from it, he was, notwithstanding 
 his own nonconformity, most amply entitled. 2 
 
 Queensbury's administration ensued, in wHhich the maxims 
 that had guided his predecessors were so far from being re- 
 linquished, that they were pursued, if possible, with greater 
 steadiness and activity. Lawrie of Blackwood was condemned 
 for having holden intercourse with a rebel, whose name was 
 not to be found in any of the lists of the intercommuned or 
 proscribed; and a proclamation was issued, threatening all 
 who were in like circumstances with a similar fate. The 
 intercourse with rebels having been in great parts of the 
 kingdom promiscuous and universal, more than twenty thou- 
 sand persons were objects of this menace. 3 Fines and extor- 
 tions of all kinds were employed to enrich the public treasury, 
 to which, therefore, the multiplication of crimes became a 
 fruitful source of revenue; and lest it should not be suffi- 
 ciently so, husbands were made answerable (and that too with 
 a retrospect,) for the absence of their wives from church; a 
 
 1 The disgusting ease with which James (in his Memoirs, Macphersons 
 State Papers, i. 123,) speaks of Argyle's case, his pretence that he put his 
 life in jeopardy only with a view to seize his property, seems to destroy all 
 notions of this prince's having had any honour or conscience ; nor after 
 this, can we give much credit to the declaration, that Argyle's life was not 
 aimed at. — Note from Mr. Fox's Common-Place Book. 
 
 2 Bumet. s Burnet. Laing, 132. 
 
1685.] DECLARATION OF THE CAMERON1ANS. 357 
 
 circumstance which the presbyterian women's aversion to the 
 episcopal form of worship had rendered very general. 1 
 
 This system of government, and especially the rigour with 
 which those concerned in the late insurrections, the excom- 
 munication of the king, or the other outrages complained of, 
 were pursued and hunted, sometimes by bloodhounds, some- 
 times by soldiers almost equally savage, and afterwards shot 
 like wild beasts, 2 drove some of those sectaries who were 
 styled Cameronians, and other proscribed persons, to measures 
 of absolute desperation. They made a declaration, which 
 they caused to be affixed to different churches, importing, 
 that they would use the law of retaliation, and " we will," 
 said they, " punish as enemies to God, and to the covenant, 
 such persons as shall make it their work to imbrue their 
 hands in our blood; and chiefly, if they shall continue obsti- 
 nately and with habitual malice to proceed against us;" with 
 more to the like effect. 3 Upon such an occasion the inter- 
 ference of government became necessary. The government did 
 indeed interfere, and by a vote of council ordered, that who- 
 ever owned or refused to disown the declaration on oath, should 
 be put to death, in the presence of two witnesses, though 
 unarmed when taken. The execution of this massacre in 
 the twelve counties which were principally concerned, was 
 committed to the military, and exceeded, if possible, the order 
 itself. The disowning the declaration was required to be in 
 a particular form prescribed. Women, obstinate in their 
 fanaticism, lest female blood should be a stain upon the swords 
 of soldiers engaged in this honourable employment, were 
 drowned. The habitations, as well of those who had fled to save 
 themselves, as of those who suffered, were burnt and de- 
 stroyed. Such members of the families of the delinquents as 
 were above twelve years old, were imprisoned for the purpose 
 of being afterwards transported. The brutality of the 
 soldiers was such as might be expected from an army let 
 loose from all restraint, and employed to execute the royal 
 justice, as it was called, upon wretches. Graham, who has 
 been mentioned before, and who, under the title of lord Dun- 
 dee, a title which was probably conferred upon him by James 
 for these or similar services, was afterwards esteemed such a 
 
 1 Laing, 140. 2 Woodrow, ii. 447. 449. 3 Id. ii. 
 
358 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 hero among the Jacobite party, particularly distinguished 
 himself. Of six unarmed fugitives whom he seized, he 
 caused four to be shot in his presence, nor did the remaining 
 two experience any other mercy from him than a delay of 
 their doom; and at another time, having intercepted the 
 flight of one of these victims, he had him shown to his family, 
 and then murdered in the arms of his wife. The example of 
 persons of such high rank, and who must be presumed to 
 have had an education in some degree correspondent to their 
 station, could not fail of operating upon men of a lower order 
 in society. The carnage became every day more general and 
 more indiscriminate; and the murder of peasants in their 
 houses, or while employed at their usual work in the fields, 
 by the soldiers, was not only not reproved or punished, but 
 deemed a meritorious service by their superiors. 1 The de- 
 mise of king Charles, which happened about this time, caused 
 no suspension or relaxation in these proceedings, which 
 seemed to have been the crowning measure, as it were, or 
 finishing stroke of that system, for the steady perseverance 
 in which James so much admired the resolution of his brother. 
 It has been judged necessary to detail these transactions 
 in a manner which may, to some readers, appear an imperti- 
 nent digression from the narrative in which this history is at 
 present engaged, in order to set in a clearer light some 
 points of the greatest importance. In the first place, from 
 the summary review of the affairs of Scotland, and from the 
 complacency with which James looks back to his own share 
 of them, joined to the general approbation he expressed of 
 the conduct of government in that kingdom, we may form a 
 pretty just notion, as well of his maxims of policy, as of his 
 temper and disposition in matters where his bigotry to the 
 , Roman catholic religion had no share. For it is to be ob- 
 served and carefully kept in mind, that the church, of which 
 he not only recommends the support, but which he showed 
 himself ready to maintain by the most violent means, is the 
 episcopalian church of the protestants; that the test which 
 he enforced at the point of the bayonet was a protestant test, 
 so much so indeed, that he himself could not take it; and 
 that the more marked character of the conventicles, the ob- 
 
 1 Burnet. Woodrow. Laing. 
 
1685.] PRIMARY OBJECT OF HIS GOVERNMENT. 359 
 
 jects of his persecution, was not so much that of heretics ex- 
 communicated by the pope, as of dissenters from the church 
 of England, and irreconciieable enemies to the protestant 
 liturgy and the protestant episcopacy. But he judged the 
 church of England to be a most fit instrument for rendering 
 the monarchy absolute. On the other hand, the presbyte- 
 rians were thought naturally hostile to the principles of pas- 
 sive obedience, and to one or other, or with more probability, 
 to both of these considerations, joined to the natural violence 
 of his temper, is to be referred the whole of his conduct in 
 this part of his life, which in this view is rational enough; 
 but on the supposition of his having conceived thus early 
 the intention of introducing popery upon the ruins of the 
 church of England, is wholly unaccountable, and no less ab- 
 surd, than if a general were to put himself to great cost and 
 pains to furnish with ammunition and to strengthen with 
 fortifications, a place of which he was actually meditating 
 the attack. 
 
 The next important observation that occurs, and to which 
 even they who are most determined to believe that this prince 
 had always popery in view, and held every other considera- 
 tion as subordinate to that primary object, must nevertheless 
 subscribe, is that the most confidential advisers, as well as 
 the most furious supporters of the measures we have related, 
 were not Roman catholics. Lauderdale and Queensbury 
 were both protestants. There is no reason, therefore, to 
 impute any of James's violence afterwards to the suggestions 
 of his catholic advisers, since he who had been engaged in 
 the series of measures above related, with protestant coun- 
 sellors and coadjutors, had surely nothing to learn from 
 papists (whether priests, Jesuits, or others,) in the science of 
 tyranny. Lastly, from this account we are enabled to form 
 some notion of the state of Scotland, at a time when 
 the parliament of that kingdom was called to set an ex- 
 ample for this, and we find it to have been a state of more 
 absolute slavery than at that time subsisted in any part of 
 Christendom. 
 
 The affairs of Scotland being in the state which we have 
 described, it is no wonder that the king's letter was received 
 with acclamations of applause, and that the parliament opened, 
 not only with approbation of the government, but even with 
 
360 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685- 
 
 an enthusiastic zeal to signalize their loyalty, as well by a 
 perfect acquiescence to the king's demands, as by the most 
 fulsome expressions of adulation. " What prince in Europe, 
 or in the whole world," said the chancellor Perth, " was ever 
 like the late king, except his present majesty, who had under- 
 gone every trial of prosperity and adversity, and whose 
 unwearied clemency was not among the least conspicuous of 
 his virtues? To advance his honour and greatness was the 
 duty of all his subjects, and ought to be the endeavour of 
 their lives without reserve." The parliament voted an ad- 
 dress, scarcely less adulatory than the chancellor's speech. 
 
 "May it please your sacred majesty, — Your majesty's 
 gracious and kind remembrance of the services done by this, 
 your ancient kingdom^ to the late king your brother, of ever 
 glorious memory, shall rather raise in us ardent desires to 
 exceed whatever we have done formerly, than make us con- 
 sider them as deserving the esteem your majesty is pleased to 
 express of them in your letter to us, dated the twenty-eighth 
 of March. The death of that our excellent monarch is 
 lamented by us to all the degrees of grief that are consistent 
 with our great joy for the succession of your sacred majesty, 
 who has not only continued, but secured the happiness which 
 his wisdom, his justice, and clemency procured to us: and 
 having the honour to be the first parliament which meets by 
 your royal authority, of which we are very sensible, your 
 majesty may be confident that we will offer such laws as may 
 best secure your majesty's sacred person, the royal family 
 and government, and be so exemplary loyal, as to raise your 
 honour and greatness to the utmost of our power, which we 
 shall ever esteem both our duty and interest. Nor shall w T e 
 leave anything undone for extirpating all fanaticism, but 
 especially those fanatical murderers and assassins, and for 
 detecting and punishing the late conspirators, whose per- 
 nicious and execrable designs did so much tend to subvert 
 your majesty's government, and ruin us and all your majesty's 
 faithful subjects. We can assure your majesty, that the 
 subjects of this your majesty's ancient kingdom are so de- 
 sirous to exceed all their predecessors in extraordinary marks 
 of affection and obedience to your majesty, that (God be 
 praised,) the only way to be popular with us is to be emi- 
 nently loyal. Your majesty's care of us, when you took us 
 to be your special charge, your wisdom in extinguishing the 
 
1685.] TYRANNY OF PARLIAMENT. 36 L 
 
 seeds of rebellion and faction amongst us, your justice, which 
 was so great as to be for ever exemplary, but above all, your 
 majesty's free and cheerful securing to us our religion, when 
 you were the late king's, your royal brother's commissioner, 
 now again renewed, when you are our sovereign, are what 
 your subjects here can never forget, and therefore your 
 majesty may expect that we will think your commands sacred 
 as your person, and that your inclination will prevent our 
 debates; nor did ever any who represented our monarchs 
 as their commissioners (except your royal self,) meet with 
 greater respect, or more exact observance from a parliament, 
 than the duke of Queensbury, (whom your majesty has so 
 wisely chosen to represent you in this, and of whose eminent 
 loyalty and great abilities in all his former employments, 
 this nation hath seen so many proofs.) shall find from 
 
 " May it please your sacred majesty, your majesty's most 
 humble, most faithful, and most obedient subjects and servants, 
 
 " Perth, Cancell." 
 
 Nor was this spirit of loyalty, (as it was then called,) of 
 abject slavery, and unmanly subservience to the will of a 
 despot, as it has been justly denominated by the more im- 
 partial judgment of posterity, confined to words only. Acts 
 were passed to ratify all the late judgments, however illegal 
 or iniquitous, to indemnify the privy council, judges, and all 
 officers of the crown, civil or military, for all the violences 
 they had committed; to authorise the privy council to impose 
 the test upon all ranks of people under such penalties as that 
 board might think fit to impose; to extend the punishment of 
 death, which had formerly attached upon the preachers at field 
 conventicles only, to all their auditors, and likewise to the 
 preachers at house conventicles; to subject to the penalties of 
 treason all persons who should give or take the covenant, or 
 write in defence thereof, or in any other way own it to be 
 obligatory; and lastly, in a strain of tyranny, for which there 
 was, it is believed, no precedent, and which certainly has 
 never been surpassed, to enact that all such persons as being 
 cited in cases of high treason, field or house conventicles, 
 or church irregularities, should refuse to give testimony, 
 should be liable to the punishment due bylaw to the criminals 
 against whom they refused to be witnesses. It is true that 
 an act was also passed for confirming all former statutes in 
 
362 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 favour of the protestant religion as then established, in their 
 whole strength and tenour, as if they were particularly set 
 down and expressed in the said act; but when we recollect 
 the notions which Queensbury at that time entertained of the 
 king's views, this proceeding forms no exception to the general 
 system of servility which characterised both ministers and 
 parliament. All matters in relation to revenue were of course 
 settled in the manner most agreeable to his majesty's wishes 
 and the recommendation of his commissioner. 
 
 While the legislature was doing its part, the executive 
 government was not behindhand in pursuing the system 
 which had been so much commended. A refusal to abjure 
 the declaration in the terms prescribed, was everywhere con- 
 sidered as sufficient cause for immediate execution. In one 
 part of the country, information having been received that 
 a corpse had been clandestinely buried, an inquiry took place; 
 it was dug up, and found to be that of a person proscribed. 
 Those who had interred him were suspected, not of having 
 murdered, but of having harboured him. For this crime 
 their house was destroyed, and the women and children of 
 the family being driven out to wander as vagabonds, a young 
 man belonging to it was executed by the order of Johnston 
 of Westerraw. Against this murder even Graham himself 
 is said to have remonstrated, but was content with pro- 
 testing, that the blood was not upon his head; and not being 
 able to persuade a highland officer to execute the order 
 of Johnston, ordered his own men to shoot the unhappy 
 victim. 1 In another county, three females, cneof sixty-three 
 years of age, one of eighteen, and one of twelve, were charged 
 with rebellion; and refusing to abjure the declaration, were 
 sentenced to be drowned. The last was let off upon condition 
 of her father's giving a bond for a hundred pounds. The 
 elderly woman, who is represented as a person of eminent 
 piety, bore her fate with the greatest constancy, nor does it 
 appear that her death excited any strong sensations in the 
 minds of her savage executioners. The girl of eighteen was 
 more pitied; and after many intreaties, and having been 
 once under water, was prevailed upon to utter some words 
 which might be fairly construed into blessing the king, a 
 mode of obtaining pardon not unfrequent in cases where the 
 
 1 Wooclrow, ii. 507. 
 
1685.] OPENING OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. 363 
 
 persecutors were inclined to relent. Upon this it was thought 
 she was safe, but the merciless barbarian who superintended 
 this dreadful business was not satisfied; and upon her refus- 
 ing the abjuration, she was again plunged into the water, 
 where she expired. 1 It is to be remarked that being at Both- 
 well bridge and Air's moss were among the crimes stated in 
 the indictment of all the three, though, when the last of these 
 affairs happened, one of the girls was only thirteen, and the 
 other not eight years of age. At the time of the Bothwell bridge 
 business, they were still younger. To recite all the instances 
 of cruelty which occurred would be endless; but it maybe 
 necessary to remark that no historical facts are better ascer- 
 tained than the accounts of them which are to be found in 
 TToodrow. In every instance where there has been an op- 
 portunity of comparing these accounts with records, and 
 other authentic monuments, they appear to be quite correct. 
 
 The Scottish parliament having thus set, as they had been 
 required to do, an eminent example of what was then thought 
 duty to the crown, the king met his English parliament on 
 the 19th of May, 1685, and opened it with the following 
 speech: — 
 
 " My lords and gentlemen, — After it pleased Almighty 
 God to take to his mercy the late king, my dearest brother, 
 and to bring me to the peaceable possession of the throne of 
 my ancestors, I immediately resolved to call a parliament, as 
 the best means to settle everything upon those foundations 
 as may make my reign both easy and happy to you; towards 
 which, I am disposed to contribute all that is fit for me 
 to do. 
 
 " What I said to my privy council, at my first coming 
 there, I am desirous to renew to you; wherein I fully declare 
 my opinion concerning the principles of the church of Eng- 
 land, whose members have showed themselves so eminently 
 loyal in the worst of times, in defence of my father and sup- 
 port of my brother, (of blessed memory,) that I will always 
 take care to defend and support it. I will make it my endea- 
 vour to preserve this government, both in church and state, 
 as it is by law established: and as IwiH never depart from 
 the just rights and prerogatives of the crown, so I will never 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 506. 
 
364 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 invade any man's property; and you may be sure that 
 having heretofore ventured my life in the defence of this 
 nation, I will still go as far as any man in preserving it in all 
 its just rights and liberties. 
 
 " And having given this assurance concerning the care I 
 will have of your religion and property, which I have chose 
 to do in the same words which I used at my first coming to 
 the crown, the better to evidence to you that I spoke them 
 not by chance, and consequently that you may firmly rely 
 upon a promise so solemnly made, I cannot doubt that I 
 shall fail of suitable returns from you, with all imaginable 
 duty and kindness on your part, and particularly to what 
 relates to the settling of my revenue, and continuing it 
 during my life, as it was in the lifetime of my brother. I 
 might use many arguments to enforce this demand for the 
 benefit of trade, the support of the navy, the necessity of the 
 crown, and the well-being of the government itself, which I 
 must not suffer to be precarious: but I am confident, your 
 own consideration of what is just and reasonable will suggest 
 to you whatsoever might be enlarged upon this occasion. 
 
 " There is one popular argument which I foresee may be 
 used against what I ask of you, from the inclination men 
 have for frequent parliaments; which some may think would 
 be the best security, by feeding me, from time to time, by 
 such proportions as they shall think convenient : And this 
 argument, it being the first time I speak to you from the 
 throne, I will answer, once for all, that this w^ould be a very 
 improper method to take with me; and that the best way to 
 engage me to meet you often is always to use me well. 
 
 " I expect therefore, that you will comply with me in 
 what I have desired, and that you will do it speedily; that 
 this may be a short session, and that we may meet again to 
 all our satisfactions. 
 
 " My lords and gentlemen, — I must acquaint you, that 
 I have had news this morning from Scotland that Argyle is 
 landed in the West Highlands, with the men he brought with 
 him from Holland: that there are two declarations published; 
 one in the name of all those in arms, the other in his own. 
 It would be too long for me to repeat the substance of them; 
 it is sufficient to tell you, I am charged w T ith usurpation and 
 tyranny. The shorter of them I have directed to be forth- 
 with communicated to you. 
 
1685.] the king's speech examined. 365 
 
 " I will take the best care I can that this declaration of 
 their own faction and rebellion may meet with the reward it 
 deserves; and I will not doubt but you will be the more 
 zealous to support the government, and give me my revenue, 
 as I have desired it, without delay." 
 
 The repetition of the w^ords made use of in his first speech 
 to the privy council shows, that in the opinion of the court at 
 least they had been w r ell chosen, and had answered their 
 purpose; and even the haughty language which was added, 
 and was little less than a menace to parliament if it should 
 not comply with his wishes, was not, as it appears, unpleasing 
 to the party which at that time prevailed, since the revenue 
 enjoyed by his predecessor was unanimously, and almost 
 immediately, voted to him for life. It was not remarked, in 
 public at least, that the king's threat of governing without 
 parliament, was an unequivocal manifestation of his contempt 
 of the law of the country, so distinctly established, though so 
 ineffectually secured by the statute of the sixteenth of 
 Charles II., for holding triennial parliaments. It is said, lord- 
 keeper Guildford had prepared a different speech for his 
 majesty, but that this was preferred as being the king's ow r n 
 words; 1 and indeed that part of it, in which he says that he 
 must answer once for all, that the commons giving such pro- 
 portions as they might think convenient would be a very 
 improper w r ay with him, bears, as well as some others, the most 
 evident marks of its royal origin. It is to be observed, how- 
 ever, that in arguing for his demand, as he styles it, of 
 revenue, he says, not that the parliament ought not, but that 
 he must not suffer the well-being of the government depend- 
 ing upon such revenue to be precarious; whence it is evident 
 that he intended to have it understood, that if the parliament 
 did not grant, he purposed to levy a revenue without their 
 consent. It is impossible that any degree of party spirit 
 should so have blinded men as to prevent them from per- 
 ceiving in this speech a determination on the part of the 
 king to conduct his government upon the principles of 
 absolute monarchy, and to those who were not so possessed 
 with the love of royalty, which creates a kind of passionate 
 affection for whoever happens to be the wearer of the crown, 
 the vindictive manner in which he speaks of Argyle's inva- 
 
 1 Life of Lord Keeper North. Ralph. 
 
366 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 sion might afford sufficient evidence of the temper in which 
 his power would be administered. In that part of his speech 
 he first betrays his personal feelings towards the unfortunate 
 nobleman, whom, in his brother's reign, he had so cruelly and 
 treacherously oppressed, by dwelling upon his being charged 
 by Argyle with tyranny and usurpation, and then declares, 
 that he will take the best care, not according to the usual 
 phrases, to protect the loyal and well disposed, and to restore 
 tranquillity, but that the declaration of the factious and re- 
 bellious may meet with the reward it deserves; thus marking 
 out revenge and punishment as the consequences of victory, 
 upon which he was most intent. 
 
 It is impossible, that in a house of commons, however com- 
 posed, there should not have been many members who dis- 
 approved the principles of government announced in the 
 speech, and who were justly alarmed at the temper in which 
 it was conceived. But these, overpowered by numbers, and 
 perhaps afraid of the imputation of being concerned in plots 
 and insurrections, (an imputation which, if they had shown 
 any spirit of liberty, would most infallibly have been thrown 
 on them,) declined expressing their sentiments; and, in the 
 short session which followed, there was an almost uninter- 
 rupted unanimity in granting every demand, and acquiescing 
 in every wish of the government. The revenue was granted, 
 without any notice being taken of the illegal manner in which 
 the king had levied it upon his own authority. Argyle was 
 stigmatised as a traitor; nor was any desire expressed to 
 examine his declarations, one of which seemed to be purposely 
 withheld from parliament. Upon the communication of the 
 duke of Monmouth's landing in the west, that nobleman was 
 immediately attainted by bill. The king's assurance was 
 recognised as a sufficient security for the national religion; 
 and the liberty of the press was destroyed by the revival of 
 the statute of the 13th and 14th of Charles II. This last 
 circumstance, important as it is, does not seem to have ex- 
 cited much attention at the time, which, considering the 
 general principles then in fashion, is not surprising. That it 
 should have been scarcely noticed by any historian, is more 
 wonderful. It is true, however, that the terror inspired by 
 the late prosecutions for libels, and the violent conduct of the 
 courts upon such occasions, rendered a formal destruction of 
 
1685.] MISREPRESENTATION OF MR. HUME. 367 
 
 tlie liberty of the press a matter of less importance. So little 
 does the magistracy, when it is inclined to act tyrannically, 
 stand in need of tyrannical laws to effect its purpose. The 
 bare silence and acquiescence of the legislature is, in such a 
 case, fully sufficient to annihilate practically speaking, every 
 right and liberty of the subject. 
 
 As the grant of revenue was unanimous, so there does not 
 appear to have been anything which can justly be styled a 
 debate upon it; though Hume employs, several pages in giving 
 the arguments which, he affirms, were actually made use of, 
 and, as he gives us to understand, in the house of commons, 
 for and against the question; arguments which, on both sides, 
 seem to imply a considerable love of freedom and jealousy of 
 royal power, and are not wholly unmixed even with some 
 sentiments disrespectful to the king. Now I cannot find, 
 either from tradition, or from contemporary writers, any 
 ground to think that either the reasons which Hume has ad- 
 duced, or indeed any other, were urged in opposition to the 
 grant. The only speech made upon the occasion, seems to 
 have been that of Mr. (afterwards sir Edward) Seymour, 
 who, though of the tory party, a strenuous opposer of the 
 exclusion bill, and in general supposed to have been an ap- 
 prover, if not an adviser, of the tyrannical measures of the 
 late reign, has the merit of having stood forward singly, to 
 remind the house of what they owed to themselves and their 
 constituents. He did not, however, directly oppose the grant, 
 but stated, that the elections had been carried on under so 
 much court influence, and in other respects so illegally, that 
 it was the duty of the house first to ascertain who were the 
 legal members, before they proceeded to other business of im- 
 portance. After having pressed this point, he observed that, 
 if ever it were necessary to adopt such an order of proceed- 
 ing, it w^as more peculiarly so now, when the laws and re- 
 ligion of the nation were in evident peril; that the aversion of 
 the English people to popery, and their attachment to the 
 laws were such, as to secure these blessings from destruction 
 by any other instrumentality than that of parliament itself, 
 which, however, might be easily accomplished, if there were 
 once a parliament entirely dependent upon the person- who 
 might harbour such designs; that it was already rumoured 
 
368 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 that the Test and Habeas Corpus acts, the two bulwarks of 
 our religion and liberties, were to be repealed; that what he 
 stated was so notorious as to need no proof. Having descanted 
 with force and ability upon these and other topics of a similar 
 tendency, he urged his conclusion, that the question of royal 
 revenue ought not to be the first business of the parliament. 1 
 Whether, as Burnet thinks, because he was too proud to make 
 any previous communication of his intentions, or that the 
 strain of his argument was judged to be too bold for the times, 
 this speech, whatever secret approbation it might excite, did 
 not receive from any quarter either applause or support. 
 Under these circumstances it was not thought necessary to 
 answer him, and the grant was voted unanimously, without 
 further discussion. 
 
 As Barillon, in the relation of parliamentary proceedings, 
 transmitted by him to his court, in which he appears at this 
 time to have been very exact, gives the same description of 
 Seymour's speech and its effects with Burnet, there can be 
 little doubt but their account is correct. It will be found as 
 well in this, as in many other instances, that an unfortunate 
 inattention on the part of the reverend historian to forms, 
 has made his veracity unjustly called in question. He speaks 
 of Seymour's speech as if it had been a motion in the techni- 
 cal sense of the word, for inquiring into the elections, which 
 had no effect. Now no traces remaining of such a motion, and, 
 on the other hand, the elections having been at a subsequent 
 period inquired into, Ralph almost pronounces the whole ac- 
 count to be erroneous; whereas the only mistake consists in 
 giving the name of motion to a suggestion, upon the question 
 of a grant. It is whimsical enough, that it should be from 
 the account of the French ambassador that we are enabled to 
 reconcile to the records and to the forms of the English 
 house of commons, a relation made by a distinguished mem- 
 ber of the English house of lords. Sir John Reresby does 
 indeed say, that among the gentlemen of the house of commons 
 whom he accidentally met, they in general seemed willing to 
 settle a handsome revenue upon the king, and to give him 
 money; but whether their grant should be permanent, or only 
 temporary, and to be renewed from time to time by parlia- 
 
 1 Burnet, ii. 322. 
 
1685.] VOTES CONCERNING RELIGION. 369 
 
 ment, that the nation might be often consulted, was the ques- 
 tion. 1 But besides the looseness of the expression, which 
 may only mean that the point was questionable, it is to be 
 observed, that he does not relate any of the arguments which 
 w r ere brought forward even in the private conversations to 
 which he refers; and when he afterwards gives an account of 
 what passed in the house of commons, (where he was present,) 
 he does not hint at any debate having taken place, but rather 
 implies the contrary. 
 
 This misrepresentation of Mr. Hume's is of no small im- 
 portance, inasmuch as, by intimating that such a question 
 could be debated at all, and much more, that it was debated 
 with the enlightened views and bold topics of argument 
 with which his genius has supplied him, he gives us a very 
 false notion of the character of the parliament and of the 
 times which he is describing. It is not improbable, that if 
 the arguments had been used, which this historian supposes, 
 the utterer of them would have been expelled, or sent to the 
 Tower; and it is certain that he would not have been heard 
 with any degree of attention or even patience. 
 
 The unanimous vote for trusting the safety of religion to 
 the king's declaration, passed not without observation; the 
 rights of the church of England being the only point upon 
 which, at this time, the parliament were in any degree jealous 
 of the royal power. The committee of religion had voted 
 unanimously, " That it is the opinion of the committee, that 
 this house will stand by his majesty with their lives and 
 fortunes, according to their bounden duty and allegiance, in 
 defence of the reformed church of England, as it is now by 
 law established; and that an humble address be presented to 
 his majesty, to desire him to issue forth his royal proclama- 
 tion, to cause the penal laws to be put in execution against 
 all dissenters from the church of England whatsoever." But 
 upon the report of the house, the question of agreeing with 
 the committee was evaded by a previous question, and the 
 house, with equal unanimity, resolved: "That this house 
 doth acquiesce, and entirely rely, and rest wholly satisfied, 
 on his majesty's gracious word, and repeated declaration to 
 support and defend the religion of the church of England, as 
 
 1 Reresby's Memoirs, 102. 
 
 B B 
 
370 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 it is now by law established, which is dearer to us than our 
 lives." Mr. Echard, and bishop Kennet, two writers of 
 different principles, but both churchmen, assign, as the 
 motive of this vote, the unwillingness of the party then pre- 
 valent in parliament to adopt severe measures against the 
 protestant dissenters ; but in this notion they are by no means 
 supported by the account, imperfect as it is, which sir John 
 Reresby gives of the debate; for he makes no mention of 
 tenderness towards dissenters, but states, as the chief argu- 
 ment against agreeing with the committee, that it might 
 excite a jealousy of the king; 1 and Barillon expressly says, 
 that the first vote gave great offence to the king, still more 
 to the queen, and that orders were, in consequence, issued to 
 the court members of the house of commons to devise some 
 means to get rid of it. Indeed, the general circumstances of 
 the times are decisive against the hypothesis of the two 
 reverend historians; nor is it, as far as I know, adopted by 
 any other historians. The probability seems to be, that the 
 motion in the committee had been originally suggested by 
 some whig member, who could not, with prudence, speak 
 his real sentiments openly, and who thought to embarrass the 
 government, by touching upon a matter where the union 
 between the church party and the king would be put to the 
 severest test. The zeal of the tories for persecution made 
 them at first give into the snare; but when, upon reflection, 
 it occurred that the involving of the catholics in one common 
 danger with the protestant dissenters, must be displeasing to 
 the king, they drew back without delay, and passed the 
 most comprehensive vote of confidence which James could 
 desire. 2 
 
 Further to manifest their servility to the king, as well as 
 their hostility to every principle that could by implication be 
 supposed to be connected with Monmouth or his cause, the 
 
 1 Ecliard. Kennet, 441. Reresby, 198. 
 2 A most curious instance of the circuitous mode and deep devices to 
 which the whigs, if they wished at this time to oppose the court, were 
 obliged to resort, is a scheme which seems to have been seriously enter- 
 tained by them, of moving to disqualify from office all persons who had 
 voted for the exclusion. Disqualification from offices, which they had no 
 means of obtaining, was to them of no importance, and by obliging the king 
 to remove Godolphin, and more especially Sunderland, they might put the 
 court to considerable difficulties. 
 
1685.] BILL FOR PRESERVING THE KING'S PERSON. 371 
 
 house of commons passed a bill for the preservation of his 
 majesty's person, in which, after enacting that a written or 
 verbal declaration of a treasonable intention should be tanta- 
 mount to a treasonable act, they inserted two remarkable 
 clauses, by one of which to assert the legitimacy of Monmouth's 
 birth, by the other, to propose in parliament any alteration in 
 the succession of the crown, were made likewise high treason. 
 We learn from Burnet, 1 that the first part of this bill was 
 strenuously and warmly debated, and that it was chiefly op- 
 posed by serjeant Maynard, whose arguments made some 
 impression even at that time; but whether the serjeant was 
 supported in his opposition, as the word chiefly would lead us 
 to imagine, or if supported, by whom, that historian does not 
 mention; and, unfortunately, neither of MaynarcVs speech 
 itself, nor indeed of any opposition whatever to the bill, is 
 there any other trace to be found. The crying injustice of the 
 clause which subjected a man to the pains of treason merely 
 for delivering his opinion upon a controverted fact, though he 
 should do no act in consequence of such opinion, was not, as 
 far as we are informed, objected to or at all noticed, unless 
 indeed the speech above alluded to, in which the speaker is 
 said to have descanted upon the general danger of making 
 words treasonable, be supposed to have been applied to this 
 clause as well as to the former part of the bill. That the 
 other clause should have passed without opposition or even 
 
 1 Balph unjustly accuses Burnet of inaccuracy on this occasion, and 
 asserts, " That unfortunately for us, or this right reverend author, there is 
 not the least trace of any such bill to be foimd in any of the accounts of 
 this parliament extant; and therefore we are under a necessity to suppose, 
 that if any such clause was offered, it was by way of supplement to the 
 hill for the preservation of his majesty's person and government, whir 
 doubt, was strict enough, and which passed the house of commons while 
 Monmouth was in arms, just before the adjournment, but never reached the 
 lords," ii. 911. Now, the enactment to which the bishop alludes, was Dot, 
 as Ealph supposes, a supplement to the bill for the preservation of hie ma- 
 jesty's person, but made part of the very first clause of it; ami the only in- 
 accuracy, if indeed it deserves that name, of which Burnet i- guilty, i^ that 
 of calling the bill what it really was, a Bill for Declaring 'I reasons, and not 
 giving it its formal title of a' Bill for the Preservation of II, 
 Person, &c. The bill is preserved among the papers of the boos 
 mons ; and whoever peruses with attention some of oni I 
 will perceive, that though not adduced as a precedent 
 of the inauspicious reign in which it made its appefl 
 often been used as a model. 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 observation, must appear still more extraordinary, when we 
 advert, not only to the nature of the clause itself, but to the 
 circumstances of there being actually in the house no incon- 
 siderable number of members who had, in the former reign, 
 repeatedly voted for the exclusion bill. 
 
 It is worthy of notice, however, that while every principle 
 of criminal jurisprudence, and every regard to the funda- 
 mental rights of the deliberative assemblies, which make part 
 of the legislature of the nation, were thus shamelessly sacri- 
 ficed to the eagerness which, at this disgraceful period, so 
 generally prevailed of manifesting loyalty, or rather abject 
 servility to the sovereign, there still remained no small degree 
 of tenderness for the interests and safety of the church of 
 England, and a sentiment approaching to jealousy upon any 
 matter which might endanger, even by the most remote con- 
 sequences, or put any restriction upon her ministers. With 
 this view, as one part of the bill did not relate to treasons only, 
 but imposed new penalties upon such as should, by writing, 
 printing, preaching, or other speaking, attempt to bring the 
 king or his government into hatred or contempt, there was a 
 special proviso added, " that the asserting and maintaining, 
 by any writing, printing, preaching, or any other speaking, 
 the doctrine, discipline, divine worship, or government of the 
 church of England as it is now by law established, against 
 popery or any other different or dissenting opinions, is not 
 intended, and shall not be interpreted or construed to be any 
 oifence within the words or meaning of this act." It cannot 
 escape the reader, that only such attacks upon popery as were 
 made in favour of the doctrine and discipline of the church of 
 England, and no other, were protected by this proviso, and 
 consequently that, if there were any real occasion for such a 
 guard, all protestant dissenters who should write or speak 
 against the Roman superstition, were wholly unprotected by 
 it, and remained exposed to the danger, whatever it might be, 
 from which the church was so anxious to exempt her sup- 
 porters. 
 
 This bill passed the house of commons, and was sent up to 
 the house of lords on the 30th of June. It was read a first 
 time on that day, but the adjournment of both houses taking 
 place on the 2nd of July, it could not make any further pro- 
 gress at that time; and when the parliament met afterwards 
 
1685.] THE REVENUE BILL. 373 
 
 in autumn, there was no longer that passionate affection for 
 the monarch, nor consequently that ardent zeal for servitude 
 which were necessary to make a law with such clauses and 
 provisos palatable or even endurable. 
 
 It is not to be considered as an exception to the general 
 complaisance of parliament, that the speaker, when he pre- 
 sented the revenue bill, made use of some strong expressions, 
 declaring the attachment of the commons to the national 
 religion. 1 Such sentiments could not be supposed to be dis- 
 pleasing to James, after the assurances he had given of his 
 regard for the church of England. Upon this occasion his 
 majesty made the following speech: — 
 
 " My lords and gentlemen, — I thank you very heartily 
 for the bill you have presented me this day; and I assure you, 
 the readiness and cheerfulness that has attended the despatch 
 of it, is as acceptable to me as the bill itself. 
 
 " After so happy a beginning, you may believe I would 
 not call upon you unnecessarily for an extraordinary supply; 
 but when I tell you, that the stores of the navy and ordnance 
 are extremely exhausted, that the anticipations upon several 
 branches of the revenue are great and burthensome; that the 
 debts of the king, my brother, to his servants and family, are 
 such as deserve compassion; that the rebellion in Scotland, 
 without putting more weight upon it than it really deserves, 
 must oblige me to a considerable expense extraordinary: I 
 am sure, such considerations will move you to give me an 
 aid to provide for those things, wherein the security, the 
 ease, and the happiness of my government are so much con- 
 cerned. But above all, I must recommend to you the care of 
 the navy, the strength and glory of this nation; that you will 
 put it into such a condition as may make us considered 
 and respected abroad. I cannot express my concern upon 
 this occasion more suitable to my own thoughts of it than 
 by assuring you I have a true English heart, as jealous of 
 the honour of the nation as you can be; and I please myself 
 with the hopes, that by God's blessing and your assistance, I 
 
 1 " The commons of England have here presented your majesty with the 
 Bill of Tonnage and Poundage, -with all readiness and cheerfulness : and 
 that without any security for their religion, though it be dearer to them than 
 their lives, relying -wholly on your royal word for the security of it ; and 
 humbly beseech your majesty to accept this their offer," &C. — Ketmet, ii. 421 . 
 
374 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 may carry the reputation of it yet higher in the world than 
 ever it has been in the time of any of my ancestors; and as 
 I will not call upon you for supplies but when they are of 
 public use and advantage, so I promise you, that what you 
 give me upon such occasions shall be managed with good 
 husbandry; and I will take care it shall be employed to the 
 uses for which I ask them." 
 
 Rapin, Hume, and Ralph, observe upon this speech, that 
 neither the generosity of the commons' grant, nor the confi- 
 dence they expressed upon religious matters, could extort a 
 kind word in favour of their religion. But this observation, 
 whether meant as a reproach to him for his want of gracious 
 feeling to a generous parliament, or as an oblique compliment 
 to his sincerity, has no force in it. His majesty's speech was 
 spoken immediately upon passing the bills which the speaker 
 presented, and he could not therefore take notice of the 
 speaker's words, unless he had spoken extempore; for the 
 custom is not, nor I believe ever was, for the speaker to 
 give beforehand copies of addresses of this nature. James 
 would not certainly have scrupled to repeat the assurances 
 which he had so lately made in favour of the protestant reli- 
 gion, as he did not scruple to talk of his true English heart, 
 honour of the nation, &c, at a time when he w T as engaged 
 w r ith France; but the speech was prepared for an answer to 
 a money bill, not for a question of the protestant religion and 
 church, and the false professions in it are adapted to what 
 was supposed to be the only subject of it. 
 
 The only matter in which the king's views were in any 
 degree thwarted, was the reversal of lord Stafford's attainder, 
 which, having passed the house of lords, not without opposi- 
 tion, was lost in the house of commons; a strong proof that 
 the popish plot was still the subject upon which the opposers 
 of the court had most credit with the public. Mr. Hume, 
 notwithstanding his just indignation at the condemnation of 
 Stafford, and his general inclination to approve of royal 
 politics, most unaccountably justifies the commons in their 
 rejection of this bill, upon the principle of its being impolitic 
 at that time to grant so full a justification of the catholics, 
 and to throw so foul an imputation upon the protestants. 
 Surely if there be one moral duty that is binding upon men 
 in all times, places, and circumstances, and from which no 
 
1685.] CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH PARTY. 375 
 
 supposed views of policy can excuse them, it is that of grant- 
 ing a full justification to the innocent; and such Mr. Hume 
 considers the catholics, and especially lord Stafford to have 
 been. The only rational way of accounting for this solitary 
 instance of non-compliance on the part of the commons, is 
 either to suppose that they still believed in the reality of the 
 popish plot, and Stafford's guilt, or that the church party, 
 which was uppermost, had such an antipathy to popery, as 
 indeed to every sect whose tenets differed from theirs, that 
 they deemed everything lawful against its professors. 
 
 On the 2nd of July, parliament was adjourned for the 
 purpose of enabling the principal gentlemen to be present in 
 their respective counties, at a time when their services and 
 influence might be so necessary to government. It is said 
 that the house of commons consisted of members so devoted 
 to James, that he declared there were not forty in it whom 
 he would not himself have named. But although this may 
 have been true, and though from the new modelling of the 
 corporations, and the interference of the court in elections, 
 this parliament, as far as regards the manner of its being 
 chosen, was by no means a fair representative of the legal 
 electors of England, yet there is reason to think that it 
 afforded a tolerably correct sample of the disposition of the 
 nation, and especially of the church party, which was then 
 uppermost. 
 
 The general character of the party at this time appears to 
 have been a high notion of the king's constitutional power, to 
 which was superadded a kind of religious abhorrence of all 
 resistance to the monarch, not only in cases where such 
 resistance was directed against the lawful prerogative, but 
 even in opposition to encroachments, which the monarch 
 might make beyond the extended limits which they assigned 
 to his prerogative. But these tenets, and still more the 
 principle of conduct naturally resulting from them, were con- 
 fined to the civil, as contradistinguished from the ecclesiastical 
 polity of the country. In church matters they neither ac- 
 knowledged any very high authority in the crown, nor were 
 they willing to submit to any royal encroachment on tli.it 
 side; and a steady attachment to the church of England, with 
 a proportionable aversion to all dissenters from it, whether 
 catholic or protestant, was almost universally prevalent among 
 
376 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 them. A due consideration of these distinct features in the 
 character of a party so powerful in Charles's and in James's 
 time, and even when it was lowest, (that is, during the reigns 
 of the two first princes of the house of Brunswick,) by no 
 means inconsiderable, is exceedingly necessary to the right 
 understanding of English history. It affords a clue to many 
 passages otherwise unintelligible. For want of a proper 
 attention to this circumstance, some historians have con- 
 sidered the conduct of the tories in promoting the revolution 
 as an instance of great inconsistency. Some have supposed, 
 contrary to the clearest evidence, that their notions of passive 
 obedience, even in civil matters, were limited, and that their 
 support of the government of Charles and James was founded 
 upon a belief that those princes would never abuse their pre- 
 rogative for the purpose of introducing arbitrary sway. But 
 this hypothesis is contrary to the evidence both of their 
 declarations and their conduct. Obedience without reserve, 
 an abhorrence of all resistance, as contrary to the tenets of 
 their religion, are the principles which they professed in their 
 addresses, their sermons, and their decrees at Oxford; and 
 surely nothing short of such principles could make men esteem 
 the latter years of Charles II., and the opening of the reign 
 of his successor, an era of national happiness and exemplary 
 government. Yet this is the representation of that period, 
 which is usually made by historians and other writers of the 
 church party. " Never were fairer promises on one side, nor 
 greater generosity on the other," says Mr. Echard. " The 
 king had as yet, in no instance, invaded the rights of his 
 subjects," says the author of the Caveat against the Whigs. 
 Thus, as long as James contented himself with absolute 
 power in civil matters, and did not make use of his authority 
 against the church, everything went smooth and easy; nor is 
 it necessary, in order to account for the satisfaction of the 
 parliament and people, to have recourse to any implied com- 
 promise by which the nation was willing to yield its civil 
 liberties as the price of retaining its religious constitution. 
 The truth seems to be, that the king, in asserting his un- 
 limited power, rather fell in with the humour of the prevailing 
 party than offered any violence to it. Absolute power in 
 civil matters, under the specious names of monarchy and 
 prerogative, formed a most essential part of the tory creed; 
 
1685.] SITUATION OF THE WHIGS. 377 
 
 but the order in which church and king are placed in the 
 favourite device of the party, is not accidental, and is well 
 calculated to show the genuine principles of such among them 
 as are not corrupted by influence. Accordingly, as the sequel 
 of this reign will abundantly show, when they found them- 
 selves compelled to make an option, they preferred, without 
 any degree of inconsistency, their first idol to their second, 
 and when they could not preserve both church and king, 
 declared for the former. 
 
 It gives certainly no very flattering picture of the country 
 to describe it as being in some sense fairly represented by 
 this servile parliament, and not only acquiescing in, but 
 delighted with the early measures of James's reign; the con- 
 tempt of law exhibited in the arbitrary mode of raising 
 his revenue; his insulting menace to the parliament, that if 
 they did not use him well, he would govern without them; 
 his furious persecution of the protestant dissenters, and the 
 spirit of despotism which appeared in all his speeches and 
 actions. But it is to be remembered, that these measures 
 were in nowise contrary to the principles or prejudices of the 
 church party, but rather highly agreeable to them; and that 
 the whigs, who alone were possessed of any just notions of 
 liberty, were so out-numbered and discomfited by persecu- 
 tion, that such of them as did not think fit to engage in the 
 rash schemes of Monmouth or Argyle, held it to be their 
 interest to interfere as little as possible in public affairs, and 
 by no means to obtrude upon unwilling hearers opinions and 
 sentiments which, ever since the dissolution of the Oxford 
 parliament, in 1681, had been generally discountenanced, 
 and of which the peaceable, or rather triumphant accession 
 of James to the throne was supposed to seal the condem- 
 nation. 
 
378 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [168Ï 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Attempts of Argyle and Monmouth — Account of their followers — Argyle's 
 expedition discovered — His descent in Argyleshire — Dissensions among 
 his followers — Loss of his shipping — His army dispersed, and himself 
 taken prisoner — His behaviour in prison — His execution — The fate of 
 his followers — Rumbold's last declaration examined — Monmouth's 
 invasion of England — His first success and reception — His delays, dis- 
 appointment, and despondency— Battle of Sedgmoor — He is discovered 
 and taken — His letter to the king — His interview with James — His 
 preparations for death — Circumstances attending his execution — His 
 character. 
 
 It is now necessary to give some account of those attempts 
 in Scotland by the earl of Argyle, and in England by the 
 duke of Monmouth, of which the king had informed his 
 parliament in the manner recited in the preceding chapter. 
 The earl of Argyle was son to the marquis of Argyle, of 
 whose unjust execution, and the treacherous circumstances 
 accompanying it, notice has already been taken. He had in 
 his youth been strongly attached to the royal cause, and had 
 refused to lay down his arms till he had the exiled king's 
 positive orders for that purpose. But the merit of his early 
 services could neither save the life of his father, nor even 
 procure for himself a complete restitution of his family 
 honours and estates; and not long after the restoration, upon 
 an accusation of leasing -making, an accusation founded, in 
 this instance, upon a private letter to a fellow- subject, in 
 which he spoke with some freedom of his majesty's Scottish 
 ministry, he was condemned to death. The sentence was 
 suspended and finally remitted, but not till after an impri- 
 soment of twelve months and upwards. In this affair he was 
 much assisted by the friendship of the duke of Lauderdale, 
 
1685.] DUKE OF MONMOUTH. 379 
 
 with whom he ever afterwards lived upon terms of friend- 
 ship, though his principles would not permit him to give 
 active assistance to that nobleman in his government of Scot- 
 land. Accordingly, we do not, during that period find Argyle's 
 name among those who held any of those great employments 
 of state to which, by his rank and consequence, he was natu- 
 rally entitled. When James, then duke of York, was ap- 
 pointed to the Scottish government, it seems to have been the 
 earl's intention to cultivate his royal highness's favour, and he 
 was a strenuous supporter of the bill which condemned all 
 attempts at exclusions or other alterations in the succession 
 of the crown. But having highly offended that prince by 
 insisting, on the occasion of the test, that the royal family, 
 when in office, should not be exempted from taking that 
 oath w r hich they imposed upon subjects in like situations, his 
 royal highness ordered a prosecution against him, for the 
 explanation with which he had taken the test oath at the 
 council-board, and the earl was, as we have seen, again con- 
 demned to death. From the time of his escape from prison, 
 he resided wholly in foreign countries, and was looked to as 
 a principal ally by such of the English patriots as had at any 
 time entertained thoughts, whether more or less ripened, of 
 delivering their country. 
 
 James duke of Monmouth was the eldest of the late king's 
 natural children. In the early parts of his life, he held the 
 first place in his father's affections; and even in the height of 
 Charles's displeasure at his political conduct, attentive ob- 
 servers thought they could discern that the traces of paternal 
 tenderness were by no means effaced. Appearing at court in 
 the bloom of youth, with a beautiful figure and engaging 
 manners, known to be the darling of the monarch, it is no 
 wonder that he was early assailed by the arts of flattery; and 
 it is rather a proof that he had not the strongest of all minds, 
 than of any extraordinary weakness of character, that he was 
 not proof against them. He had appeared with some distinc- 
 tion in the Flemish campaigns, and his conduct had been 
 noticed with the approbation of the commanders, as well 
 Dutch as French, under whom he had respectively served 
 His courage was allowed by all, his person admired, his gene- 
 rosity loved, his sincerity confided in. If his talents were not 
 of the first rate, they were by no means contemptible; and he 
 
380 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 possessed, in an eminent degree, qualities which, in popular 
 government, are far more effective than the most splendid 
 talents; qualities by which he inspired those who followed 
 him, not only with confidence and esteem, but with affection, 
 enthusiasm, and even fondness. Thus endowed, it is not 
 surprising that his youthful mind was fired with ambition, 
 or that he should consider the putting himself at the head of 
 a party (a situation for which he seems to have been pecu- 
 liarly qualified by so many advantages) as the means by 
 which he was most likely to attain his object. 
 
 Many circumstances contributed to outweigh the scruples 
 which must have harassed a man of his excellent nature, 
 when he considered the obligations of filial duty and grati- 
 tude, and when he reflected that the particular relation in 
 which he stood to the king rendered a conduct, which in any 
 other subject would have been meritorious, doubtful, if not 
 extremely culpable in him. Among these, not the least was 
 the declared enmity winch subsisted between him and his 
 uncle, the duke of York. The earl of Mulgrave, afterwards 
 duke of Buckinghamshire, boasted in his Memoirs, that this 
 enmity was originally owing to his contrivances; and while 
 he is relating a conduct, upon which the only doubt can be, 
 whether the object or the means were the most infamous, 
 seems to applaud himself as if he had achieved some notable 
 exploit. While, on the one hand, a prospect of his uncle's 
 succession to the crown was intolerable to him, as involving 
 in it a certain destruction of even the most reasonable and 
 limited views of ambition which he might entertain, he was 
 easily led to believe, on the other hand, that no harm, but the 
 reverse, was intended towards his royal father, whose reign 
 and life might become precarious if he obstinately persevered 
 in supporting his brother; whereas., on the contrary, if he 
 could be persuaded, or even forced, to yield to the wishes of 
 his subjects, he might long reign a powerful, happy, and 
 popular prince. 
 
 It is also reasonable to believe, that with those personal 
 and private motives, others might co-operate of a public- 
 nature and of a more noble character. The protestant reli- 
 gion, to which he seems to have been sincerely attached, 
 would be persecuted, or perhaps exterminated, if the king 
 should be successful in his support of the duke of York and 
 
1685.] POLITICAL MOTIVES OF HIS CONDUCT. 381 
 
 his faction. At least, such was the opinion generally preva- 
 lent, while, with respect to the civil liberties of the country, 
 no doubt could be entertained, that if the court party pre- 
 vailed in the struggle then depending, they would be com- 
 pletely extinguished. Something may be attributed to his 
 admiration of the talents of some, to his personal friendship 
 for others among the leaders of the whigs, more to the apti- 
 tude of a generous nature to adopt, and, if I may so say, to 
 become enamoured of those principles of justice, benevolence, 
 and equality, which form the true creed of the party which he 
 espoused. I am not inclined to believe that it was his con- 
 nexion with Shaftesbury that inspired him with ambitious 
 views, but rather to reverse cause and effect, and to suppose 
 that his ambitious views produced his connexion with that 
 nobleman; and whoever reads with attention lord Grey's 
 account of one of the party meetings at which he was present, 
 will perceive that there was not between them that perfect 
 cordiality which has been generally supposed ; but that Russell, 
 Grey, and Hampden, were upon a far more confidential foot- 
 ing with him. It is far easier to determine generally, that 
 he had high schemes of ambition, than to discover what was 
 his precise object; and those who boldly impute to him the 
 intention of succeeding to the crown, seem to pass by several 
 weighty arguments, which make strongly against their hypo- 
 thesis; such as his connexion with the duchess of Ports- 
 mouth, who, if the succession were to go to the king's illegi- 
 timate children, must naturally have been for her own son; 
 his unqualified support of the exclusion bill, which without 
 indeed mentioning her, most unequivocally settled the crown, 
 in case of a demise, upon the princess of Orange; and, above 
 all, the circumstance of his having, when driven from Eng- 
 land, twice chosen Holland for his asylum. By his cousins 
 he was received, not so much with the civility and decorum of 
 princes, as with the kind familiarity of near relations, a re- 
 ception to which he seemed to make every return of reciprocal 
 cordiality. 1 It is not rashly to be believed, that he, who has 
 never been accused of hardened wickedness, could have been 
 upon such terms with, and so have behaved to, persons whom 
 he purposed to disappoint in their dearest and best grounded 
 hopes, and to defraud of their inheritance. 
 
 1 D'Avaux. 
 
382 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 Whatever his views might be, it is evident that they were 
 of a nature wholly adverse, not only to those of the duke of 
 York, but to the schemes of power entertained by the king, 
 with which the support of his brother was intimately 
 connected. Monmouth was therefore, at the suggestion of 
 James, ordered by his father to leave the country, and de- 
 prived of all his offices, civil and military. The pretence for 
 this exile was a sort of principle of impartiality, which obliged 
 the king, at the same time that he ordered his brother to 
 retire to Flanders, to deal equal measure to his son. Upon 
 the duke of York's return (which was soon after), Monmouth 
 thought he might without blame return also; and persevering 
 in his former measures and old connexions, became deeply 
 involved in the cabals to which Essex, Russell, and Sidney fell 
 martyrs. After the death of his friends, he surrendered him- 
 self; and upon a promise that nothing said by him should be 
 used to the prejudice of any of his surviving friends, wrote a 
 penitentiary letter to his father, consenting, at the same time, 
 to ask pardon of his uncle. A great parade was made of this 
 by the court, as if it was designed by all means to goad the 
 feelings of Monmouth: his majesty was declared to have par- 
 doned him at the request of the duke of York, and his consent 
 was required to the publication of what was called his con- 
 fession. This he resolutely refused at all hazards, and was 
 again obliged to seek refuge abroad, where he had remained 
 to the period of w r hich we are now treating. 
 
 A little time before Charles's death, he had indulged hopes 
 of being recalled; and that his intelligence to that effect was 
 not quite unfounded, or if false, was at least mixed with 
 truth, is clear from the following circumstance: — From the 
 notes found when he w^as taken, in his memorandum book, it 
 appears that part of the plan concerted between the king and 
 Monmouth's friend (probably Halifax), was that the duke 
 of York should go to Scotland, 1 between which, and his being 
 sent abroad again, Monmouth and his friends saw no material 
 difference. Now in Barillon's letters to his court, dated the 
 7th of December, 1684, it appears that the duke of York had 
 told that ambassador of his intended voyage to Scotland, 
 though he represented it in a very different point of view, 
 and said that it would not be attended with any diminution 
 
 1 Welwood's Memoirs. 
 
1685.] EXILES FROM SCOTLAND. 383 
 
 of his favour or credit. This was the light in which Charles, 
 to whom the expressions, " to blind my brother, not to make 
 the duke of York fly out," and the like, were familiar, would 
 certainly have shown the affair to his brother, and therefore 
 of all the circumstances adduced, this appears to me to be the 
 strongest in favour of the supposition, that there was in the 
 king's mind a real intention of making an important, if not 
 a complete, change in his councils and measures. 
 
 Besides these two leaders, there were on the continent at 
 that time several other gentlemen of great consideration. Sir 
 Patrick Hume, of Polworth, had early distinguished himself 
 in the cause of liberty. When the privy council of Scotland 
 passed an order, compelling the counties to pay the expense 
 of the garrisons arbitrarily placed in them, he refused to pay 
 his quota, and by a mode of appeal to the court of session, 
 which the Scotch lawyers call a bill of suspension, endea- 
 voured to procure redress. The council ordered him to be 
 imprisoned, for no other crime, as it should seem, than that 
 of having thus attempted to procure, by a legal process, a 
 legal decision upon a point of law. After having remained 
 in close confinement in Stirling Castle, for near four years, 
 he was set at liberty through the favour and interest of Mon- 
 mouth. Having afterwards engaged in schemes connected 
 with those imputed to Sidney and Russell, orders were issued 
 for seizing him at his house in Berwickshire; but having had 
 timely notice of his danger, from his relation, Hume of Nine- 
 wells, a gentleman attached to the royal cause, 1 but whom 
 party spirit had not rendered insensible to the ties of kindred 
 and private friendship, he found means to conceal himself for 
 a time, and shortly after to escape beyond sea. His conceal- 
 ment is said to have been in the family burial-place, where 
 the means of sustaining life were brought to him by his 
 daughter, a girl of fifteen years of age, whose duty and affec- 
 tion furnished her with courage to brave the terrors, as well 
 superstitious as real, to which she was necessarily exposed in 
 an intercourse of this nature. 2 
 
 Andrew Fletcher of Salton, a young man of great spirit, 
 
 1 It is not without some satisfaction, that I learn, upon inquiry, that this 
 gentleman was the ancestor of Hume the historian, who, in similar circum- 
 stances, would most certainly have followed his grandfather's example. 
 2 MS. account of sir P. Hume. 
 
384 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 had signalized himself in opposition to Lauderdale's adminis- 
 tration of Scotland, and had afterwards connected himself 
 with Argyle and Russell, and what was called the council of 
 six. He had, of course, thought it prudent to leave Great 
 Britain, and could not be supposed unwilling to join in any 
 enterprise which might bid fair to restore him to his country, 
 and his countrymen to their lost liberties, though, upon the 
 present occasion, which he seems to have j udged to be unfit 
 for the purpose, he endeavoured to dissuade both Argyle and 
 Monmouth from their attempts. He was a man of much 
 thought and reading, of an honourable mind, and a fiery 
 spirit, and from his enthusiastic admiration of the ancients, 
 supposed to be warmly attached, not only to republican prin- 
 ciples, but to the form of a commonwealth. Sir John Coch- 
 rane of Ochiltree had fled his country on account of the 
 transactions of 1683. His property and connexions were 
 considerable, and he was supposed to possess extensive in- 
 fluence in Airshire and the adjacent counties. 
 
 Such were the persons of chief note among the Scottish 
 emigrants. Among the English, by far the most remarkable 
 was Ford, lord Grey of Wark. A scandalous love intrigue 
 with his wife's sister had fixed a very deep stain upon his 
 private character; nor were the circumstances attending this 
 affair, which had all been brought to light in a court of 
 justice, by any means calculated to extenuate his guilt. His 
 ancient family, however, the extensive influence arising from 
 his large possessions, his talents, which appear to have been 
 very considerable, and above all, his hitherto unshaken 
 fidelity in political attachments, and the general steadiness of 
 his conduct in public life, might in some degree countervail 
 the odium which he had incurred on account of his private 
 vices. Of Matthews, Wade, and Ayloff, whose names are 
 mentioned as having both joined the preliminary councils, 
 and done actual service in the invasions, little is known by 
 which curiosity could be either gratified or excited. 
 
 Richard Rumbold, on every account, merits more particular 
 notice. He had formerly served in the republican armies; 
 and adhering to the principles of liberty which he had imbibed 
 in his youth, though nowise bigoted to the particular form of 
 a commonwealth, had been deeply engaged in the politics of 
 those who thought they saw an opportunity of rescuing their 
 
1685.] RUMBOLD AND OTHER EXILES. 385 
 
 country from the tyrannical government of the late king. 
 He was one of the persons denounced in Keeling's narrative, 
 and was accused of having conspired to assassinate the royal 
 brothers in their road to Newmarket; an accusation belied 
 by the whole tenour of his life and conduct, and which, if it 
 had been true, would have proved him, who was never 
 thought a weak or foolish man, to be as destitute of common 
 sense as of honour and probity. It was pretended that the 
 seizure of the princes was to take place at a farm called Rye 
 House, which he occupied in Essex for the purposes of his 
 trade as a maltster; and from this circumstance was derived 
 the name of the Rye House plot. Conscious of having done 
 some acts which the law, if even fairly interpreted and equi- 
 tably administered, might deem criminal, and certain that 
 many which he had not done would be both sworn and be- 
 lieved against him, he made his escape, and passed the 
 remainder of Charles's reign in exile and obscurity ; nor is 
 his name, as far as I can learn, ever mentioned from the 
 time of the Rye House plot to that of which we are now 
 treating. 
 
 It is not to be understood that there were no other names 
 upon the list of those who fled from the tyranny of the British 
 government, or thought themselves unsafe in their native 
 country, on account of its violence, besides those of the per- 
 sons above mentioned, and of such as joined in their bold and 
 hazardous enterprise. Another class of emigrants, not less 
 sensible probably to the wrongs of their country, but less 
 sanguine in their hopes of immediate redress, is ennobled by 
 the names of Burnet the historian and Mr. Locke. It is 
 difficult to accede to the opinion which the first of these seems 
 to entertain, that though particular injustices had been com- 
 mitted, the misgovernment had not been of such a nature as 
 to justify resistance by arms. 1 But the prudential reasons 
 against resistance at that time were exceedingly strong; and 
 there is no point in human concerns wherein the dictates of 
 virtue and worldly prudence are so identified as in this great 
 question of resistance by force to established government. 
 Success, it has been invidiously remarked, constitutes in 
 most instances the sole difference between the traitor and the 
 
 1 Burnet, ii. 309. 
 
 C C 
 
386 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 deliverer of his country. A rational probability of success, 
 it may be truly said, distinguishes the well-considered enter- 
 prise of the patriot, from the rash schemes of the disturber of 
 the public peace. To command success is not in the power 
 of man; but to deserve success, by choosing a proper time, 
 as well as a proper object, by the prudence of his means, no 
 less than by the purity of his views, by a cause not only in- 
 trinsically just, but likely to insure general support, is the 
 indispensable duty of him who engages in an insurrection 
 against an existing government. Upon this subject, the 
 opinion of Ludlow, who, though often misled, appears to have 
 been an honest and enlightened man, is striking and forcibly 
 expressed. " We ought," says he, " to be very careful and 
 circumspect in that particular, and at least be assured of very 
 probable grounds to believe the power under which we en- 
 gage to be sufficiently able to protect us in our undertaking; 
 otherwise I should account myself not only guilty of my own 
 blood, but also, in some measure, of the ruin and destruction 
 of all those that I should induce to engage with me, though 
 the cause were never so just." 1 Reasons of this nature, 
 mixed more or less with considerations of personal caution, 
 and in some, perhaps, with dislike and distrust of the leaders, 
 induced many, who could not but abhor the British govern- 
 ment, to wait for better opportunities, and to prefer either 
 submission at home, or exile, to an undertaking which, if not 
 hopeless, must have been deemed by all hazardous in the 
 extreme. 
 
 In the situations in which these two noblemen, Argyle 
 and Monmouth, were placed, it is not to be wondered at 
 if they were naturally willing to enter into any plan, by 
 which they might restore themselves to their country; nor 
 can it be doubted but they honestly conceived their success 
 to be intimately connected with the welfare, and especially with 
 the liberty of the several kingdoms to which they respectively 
 belonged. Monmouth, whether because he had begun at this 
 time, as he himself said, to wean his mind from ambition, 2 or 
 or from the observations he had made upon the apparently 
 rapid turn which had taken place in the minds of the Eng- 
 
 1 Ludlow's Memoirs, p. 235. 
 2 Vide his letter in Werwood's Memoirs, and in Ralph, i. 953. 
 
1685.] IMPATIENCE OF ARGYLE. 387 
 
 lish people, seems to have been very averse to rash counsels, 
 and to have thought that all attempts against James ought 
 at least to be deferred till some more favourable opportunity 
 should present itself. So far from esteeming his chance of 
 success the better, on account of there being in James's par- 
 liament many members who had voted for the exclusion bill, 
 he considered that circumstance as unfavourable. These 
 men, of whom, however, he seems to have over-rated the 
 number, would, in his opinion, be more eager than others to 
 recover the ground they had lost, by an extraordinary show 
 of zeal and attachment to the crown. But if Monmouth was 
 inclined to dilatory counsels, far different were the views and 
 designs of other exiles, who had been obliged to leave their 
 country on account of their having engaged, if not with him 
 personally, at least in the same cause with him, and who 
 were naturally enough his advisers. Among these were lord 
 Grey of Wark and Ferguson; though the latter afterwards 
 denied his having had much intercourse with the duke, and 
 the former, in his Narrative, 1 insinuates that he rather dis- 
 suaded than pressed the invasion. 
 
 But if Monmouth was inclined to delay, Argyle seems, on 
 the other hand, to have been impatient in the extreme to 
 bring matters to a crisis, and was of course anxious that the 
 attempt upon England should be made in co-operation with 
 his upon Scotland. Ralph, an historian of great acuteness 
 as well as diligence, but who falls sometimes into the common 
 error of judging too much from the event, seems to think 
 this impatience wholly unaccountable; but Argyle may have 
 had many motives which are now unknown to us. He may 
 not improbably have foreseen, that the friendly terms upon 
 which James and the prince of Orange affected at least to 
 be, one with the other, might make his stay in the United 
 Provinces impracticable, and that, if obliged to seek another 
 asylum, not only he might have been deprived, in some 
 measure, of the resources which he derived from his con- 
 nexions at Amsterdam, but that the very circumstance of 
 
 1 It is, however, notorious that he did press Monmouth very much ; and 
 this circumstance, if any were wanting, would sufficiently prove that his 
 Narrative is very little to be relied upon, in any point where he conceived 
 the falsification of a fact might serve him with the king, upon whose mercy 
 his life at that time depended. 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 his having been publicly discountenanced by the prince of 
 Orange and the States-general, might discredit his enterprise. 
 His eagerness for action may possibly have proceeded from 
 the most laudable motives, his sensibility to the horrors which 
 his countrymen were daily and hourly suffering, and his 
 ardour to relieve them. The dreadful state of Scotland, 
 while it affords so honourable an explanation of his impa- 
 tience, seems to account also, in a great measure, for his act- 
 ing against the common notions of prudence, in making his 
 attack without any previous concert with those whom he 
 expected to join him there. That this was his view of the 
 matter is plain, as we are informed by Burnet that he 
 depended not only on an army of his own clan and vassals, 
 but that he took it for granted that the western and southern 
 counties would all at once come about him, when he had 
 gathered a good force together in his own country; and 
 surely such an expectation, when we reflect upon the situa- 
 tion of those counties, was by no means unreasonable. 
 
 Argyle's counsel, backed by lord Grey and the rest of 
 Monmouth's advisers, and opposed by none except Fletcher 
 of Saltoun, to whom some add captain Matthews, prevailed, 
 and it was agreed to invade immediately and at one time the 
 two kingdoms. Monmouth had raised some money from his 
 jewels, and Argyle had a loan of ten thousand pounds from 
 a rich widow in Amsterdam. With these resources, such as 
 they were, ships and arms were provided, and Argyle sailed 
 from Vly on the 2nd of May, with three small vessels, ac- 
 companied by sir Patrick Hume, sir John Cochrane, a few 
 more Scotch gentlemen, and by two Englishmen, Ayloff, a 
 nephew by marriage to lord chancellor Clarendon, and 
 Rumbold, the maltster, who had been accused of being prin- 
 cipally concerned in that conspiracy which, from his farm 
 in Essex, where it was pretended Charles II. was to 
 have been intercepted in his way from Newmarket, and as- 
 sassinated, had been called the Rye House plot. 1 Sir Patrick 
 Hume is said to have advised the shortest passage in order 
 
 1 The detailed account of the exiles from England and Scotland (pages 
 384, 5) was inserted in the work by Mr. Fox, after this passage was 
 written. — As it is there introduced, Mr. Fox would, no doubt, have erased 
 the repetition of it; but it has been the object of the editor to preserve 
 scrupulously the words of the MS. — Ed. 
 
1685.] DISCOVERY OF ARGYLE's EXPEDITION. 389 
 
 to come more unexpectedly upon the enemy; but Argyle, 
 who is represented as remarkably tenacious of his own 
 opinions, persisted in his plan of sailing round the north of 
 Scotland, as well for the purpose of landing at once among 
 his own vassals, as for that of being nearer to the western 
 counties, which had been most severely oppressed, and from 
 which, of course, he expected most assistance. Each of these 
 plans had no doubt its peculiar advantages; but, as far as we 
 can judge at this distance of time, those belonging to the 
 earl's scheme seem to preponderate; for the force he carried 
 with him was certainly not sufficient to enable him, by strik- 
 ing any decisive stroke, to avail himself even of the most 
 unprepared state in which he could hope to find the king's 
 government. As he must therefore depend entirely upon 
 reinforcements from the country, it seemed reasonable to 
 make for that part where succour was most likely to be ob- 
 tained, even at the hazard of incurring the disadvantage 
 which must evidently result from the enemy's having early 
 notice of his attack, and consequently proportionable time 
 for defence. 
 
 Unfortunately, this hazard was converted into a certainty 
 by his sending some men on shore in the Orkneys. Two of 
 these, Spence and Blackadder, were seized at Kirkwall by 
 the bishop of the diocese, and sent up prisoners to Edinburgh, 
 by which means the government was not only satisfied of the 
 reality of the intended invasion, of which, however, they had 
 before had some intimation, 1 but could guess with a reasonable 
 certainty the part of the coast where the descent was to take 
 place, for Argyle could not possibly have sailed so far to the 
 north with any other view than that of making his landing either 
 on his own estate, or in some of the western counties. Among 
 the numberless charges of imprudence against the unfortu- 
 nate Argyle, charges too often inconsiderately urged against 
 him who fails in any enterprise of moment, that which is 
 founded upon the circumstance just mentioned appears to 
 me to be the most weighty, though it is that which is the 
 least mentioned, and by no author, as far as I recollect, much 
 enforced. If the landing in the north was merely for the 
 purpose of gaining intelligence respecting the disposition of 
 
 1 Burnet, ii. 313. Woodrow, ii. 513^ 
 
390 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 the country, or for the more frivolous object of making some 
 few prisoners, it was indeed imprudent in the highest degree. 
 That prisoners, such as were likely to be taken on this occa- 
 sion, should have been a consideration with any man of 
 common sense is impossible. The desire of gaining intelli- 
 gence concerning the disposition of the people was indeed a 
 natural curiosity; but it would be a strong instance of that 
 impatience which has been often alleged, though in no other 
 case proved, to have been part of the earl's character, if, for 
 the sake of gratifying such a desire, he gave the enemy any 
 important advantage. Of the intelligence which he sought 
 thus eagerly, it was evident that he could not in that place 
 and at that time make any immediate use; whereas, of that 
 which he afforded his enemies, they could and did avail 
 themselves against him. The most favourable account of 
 this proceeding, and which seems to deserve most credit, is 
 that having missed the proper passage through the Orkney 
 islands, he thought proper to send on shore for pilots, and 
 that Spence very imprudently took the opportunity of going 
 to confer with a relation at Kirkwall; 1 but it is to be re- 
 marked that it was not necessary, for the purpose of getting 
 pilots, to employ men of note, such as Blackadder and Spence, 
 the latter of whom was the earl's secretary; and that it was 
 an unpardonable neglect not to give the strictest injunctions 
 to those who were employed against going a step further 
 into the country than was absolutely necessary. 
 
 Argyle, with his wonted generosity of spirit, was at first 
 determined to lay siege to Kirkwall, in order to recover his 
 friends; but partly by the dissuasions of his followers, and 
 still more by the objections made by the masters of the ships, 
 to a delay w r hich might make them lose the favourable winds 
 for their intended voyage, he was induced to prosecute his 
 course. 2 In the mean time the government made the use 
 that it was obvious they would make of the information they 
 had obtained, and when the earl arrived at his destination he 
 learned that considerable forces were got together to repel 
 any attack that he might meditate. Being prevented by con- 
 trary winds from reaching the isle of Islay, where he had 
 purposed to make his first landing, he sailed back to Dun- 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 513. 2 lb. 531. 
 
1685.] OBSERVATIONS ON THE SUBJECT. 391 
 
 stafnage in Lorn, and there sent ashore his son, Mr. Charles 
 Campbell, to engage his tenants and other friends and de- 
 pendants of his family, to rise in his behalf; but even there 
 he found less encouragement and assistance than he had ex- 
 pected, and the laird of Lochniel, who gave him the best 
 assurances, treacherously betrayed him, sent his letter to the 
 government, and joined the royal forces under the marquis of 
 Athol. He then proceeded southwards, and landed at 
 Campbelltown in Kintyre, where his first step was to pub- 
 lish his declaration, which appears to have produced little or 
 no effect. 
 
 This bad beginning served, as is usual in such adventures, 
 rather to widen than to reconcile the differences which had 
 early begun to manifest themselves between the leader and 
 his followers. Hume and Cochrane, partly construing per- 
 haps too sanguinely the intelligence which was received from 
 Ayrshire, Galloway, and the other Lowland districts in that 
 quarter, partly from an expectation that where the oppres- 
 sion had been most grievous, the revolt would be propor- 
 tionably the more general, were against any stay, or as they 
 termed it, loss of time in the Highlands, but were for pro- 
 ceeding at once, weak as they were in point of numbers, to a 
 country where every man endowed with the common feelings 
 of human nature, must be their well-wisher, every man of 
 spirit their coadjutor. Argyle, on the contrary, w T ho pro- 
 bably considered the discouraging accounts from the Lowlands 
 as positive and distinct, while those which w^ere deemed 
 more favourable appeared to him to be at least uncertain and 
 provisional, thought the most prudent plan was, to strengthen 
 himself in his own country, before he attempted the invasion 
 of provinces where the enemy was so well prepared to receive 
 him. He had hopes of gaining time, not only to increase his 
 own army, but to avail himself of the cluke of Monmouth's 
 intended invasion of England, an event which must obviously 
 have great influence upon his affairs, and which, if he could 
 but maintain himself in a situation to profit by it, might be 
 productive of advantages of an importance and extent of 
 which no man could presume to calculate the limits. Of 
 these two contrary opinions, it may be difficult at this time 
 of day to appreciate the value, seeing that so much depends 
 upon the degree of credit due to the different accounts from 
 
392 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 the Lowland counties, of which our imperfect information 
 does not enable us to form any accurate judgment. But even 
 though we should not decide absolutely in favour of the 
 cogency of these reasonings which influenced the chief, it 
 must surely be admitted, that there was at least sufficient 
 probability in them to account for his not immediately giving 
 way to those of his followers, and to rescue his memory from 
 the reproach of any uncommon obstinacy, or of carrying 
 things, as Burnet phrases it, with an air of authority that 
 was not easy to men who were setting up for liberty. On 
 the other hand, it may be more difficult to exculpate the gen- 
 tlemen engaged with Argyle, for not acquiescing more cheer ^ 
 fully, and not entering more cordially into the views of a 
 man whom they had chosen for their leader and general; of 
 whose honour they had no doubt, and whose opinion, even 
 those who dissented from him must confess to be formed 
 upon no light or trivial grounds. 
 
 The differences upon the general scheme of attack led, of 
 course, to others upon points of detail. Upon every pro- 
 jected expedition there appeared a contrariety of sentiment, 
 which on some occasions produced the most violent disputes. 
 The earl was often thwarted in his plans, and in one instance 
 actually over-ruled by the vote of a council of war. Nor 
 were these divisions, which might of themselves be deemed 
 sufficient to mar an enterprise of this nature, the only ad- 
 verse circumstances which Argyle had to encounter. By the 
 forward state of preparation on the part of the government, 
 its friends were emboldened; its enemies, whose spirit had 
 been already broken by a long series of sufferings, were com- 
 pletely intimidated, and men of fickle and time-serving dispo- 
 sitions were fixed in its interests. Add to all this, that 
 where spirit was not wanting, it was accompanied with a 
 degree and species of perversity wholly inexplicable, and 
 which can hardly gain belief from any one, whose experience 
 has not made him acquainted with the extreme difficulty of 
 persuading men who pride themselves upon an extravagant 
 love of liberty, rather to compromise upon some points with 
 those who have in the main the same views with themselves, 
 than to give power (a power which will infallibly be used for 
 their own destruction) to an adversary of principles diame- 
 trically opposite; in other words, rather to concede something 
 
1685.] DISSENSIONS AMONG THE INSURGENTS. 393 
 
 to a friend, than everything to an enemy. Hence, those even 
 whose situation was the most desperate, who were either 
 wandering about the fields, or seeking refuge in rocks and 
 caverns, from the authorized assassins who were on every 
 side pursuing them, did not all join in Argyle's cause with 
 that frankness and cordiality which was to be expected. The 
 various schisms which had existed among different classes of 
 presbyterians, were still fresh in their memory. Not even 
 the persecution to which they had been in common, and 
 almost indiscriminately subjected, had reunited them. Ac- 
 cording to a most expressive phrase of an eminent minister 
 of their church, who sincerely lamented their disunion : the 
 furnace had not yet healed the rents and breaches among 
 them. 1 Some doubted whether, short of establishing all the 
 doctrines preached by Cargill and Cameron, there was any- 
 thing worth contending for; while others, still further gone in 
 enthusiasm, set no value upon liberty, or even life itself, if 
 they were to be preserved by the means of a nobleman, who 
 had, as well by his services to Charles the Second, as by 
 other instances, been guilty in the former parts of his conduct 
 of what they termed unlawful compliances. 
 
 Perplexed, no doubt, but not dismayed, by these difficul- 
 ties, the earl proceeded to Tarbet, which he had fixed as the 
 place of rendezvous, and there issued a second declaration, 
 (that which has been mentioned as having been laid before 
 the house of commons,) with as little effect as the first. He 
 was joined by sir Duncan Campbell, who alone, of all his 
 kinsmen, seems to have afforded him any material assistance, 
 and who brought with him nearly a thousand men; but even 
 with this important reinforcement, his whole army does not 
 appear to have exceeded two thousand. It was here that he 
 was over-ruled by a council of war, when he proposed march- 
 ing to Inverary; and after much debate, so far was he from 
 being so self-willed as he is represented, that he consented to 
 go over with his army to that part of Argyleshire called 
 Cowal, and that sir John Cochrane should make an attempt 
 upon the Lowlands; and he sent with him major Fullarton, 
 one of the officers in whom he most trusted, and who appears 
 to have best deserved his confidence. This expedition could 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 530. 
 
394 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 not land in Ayrshire, where it had at first been intended, 
 owing to the appearance of two king's frigates, which had been 
 sent into those seas; and when it did land near Greenock, 
 no other advantage was derived from it than the procuring 
 from the town a very small supply of provisions. 1 
 
 When Cochrane, with his detachment, returned to Cowal, 
 all hopes of success in the Low T lands seemed, for the present 
 at least, to be at an end, and Argyle's original plan was now 
 necessarily adopted, though under circumstances greatly dis- 
 advantageous. Among these the most important was, the 
 approach of the frigates, which obliged the earl to place his 
 ships under the protection of the castle of Ellengreg, which 
 he fortified and garrisoned as well as his contracted means 
 would permit. Yet even in this situation, deprived of the 
 co-operation of his little fleet, as well as of that part of his 
 force which he left to defend it, being well seconded by the 
 spirit and activity of Kumbold, who had seized the castle of 
 Ardkinglass, near the head of Loch Fin, he was not without 
 hopes of success in his main enterprise against Inverary, 
 when he was called back to Ellengreg, by intelligence of 
 fresh discontents having broken out there, upon the nearer 
 approach of the frigates. Some of the most dissatisfied had 
 even threatened to leave both castle and ships to their fate; 
 nor did the appearance of the earl himself by any means 
 bring with it that degree of authority which was requisite in 
 such a juncture. His first motion was to disregard the supe- 
 rior force of the men of war, and to engage them with his 
 small fleet; but he soon discovered that he was far indeed 
 from being furnished with the materials necessary to put in 
 execution so bold, or, as it may possibly be thought, so 
 romantic a resolution. His associates remonstrated, and a 
 mutiny in his ships was predicted as a certain consequence 
 of the attempt. Leaving, therefore, once more, Ellengreg 
 with a garrison under the command of the laird of Lochness, 
 and strict orders to destroy both ships and fortification, 
 rather than suffer them to fall into the hands of the enemy, 
 he marched towards Gareloch. But whether from the inade- 
 quacy of the provisions with which he w r as to supply it, or 
 from cowardice, misconduct, or treachery, it does not appear, 
 
 1 Woodrow. 
 
1685.] DISPERSION OF ARGYLE's ARMY. 395 
 
 the castle was soon evacuated without any proper measures 
 being taken to execute the earl's orders, and the military 
 stores in it to a considerable amount, as well as the ships 
 which had no other defence, were abandoned to the king's 
 forces. 
 
 This was a severe blow; and all hopes of acting according 
 to the earl's plan of establishing himself strongly in Argyle- 
 shire, were now extinguished. He therefore consented to 
 pass the Leven, a little above Dumbarton, and to march east- 
 wards. In this march he was overtaken, at a place called 
 Killerne, by lord Dumbarton, at the head of a large body of 
 the king's troops ; but he posted himself with so much skill 
 and judgment, that Dumbarton thought it prudent to w^ait, at 
 least till the ensuing morning, before he made his attack. 
 Here, again, Argyle was for risking an engagement, and in 
 his nearly desperate situation, it was probably his best chance, 
 but his advice (for his repeated misfortunes had scarcely left 
 him the shadow of command) was rejected. 1 On the other 
 hand, a proposal was made to him, the most absurd as it 
 should seem, that was ever suggested in similar circumstances, 
 to pass the enemy in the night, and thus exposing his rear, to 
 subject himself to the danger of being surrounded, for the 
 sake of advancing he knew not whither, or for what purpose. 
 To this he could not consent; and it was at last agreed to de- 
 ceive the enemies by lighting fires, and to decamp in the 
 night towards Glasgow. The first part of this plan was exe- 
 cuted with success, and the army went ofi° unperceived by the 
 enemy; but in their night march, they were misled by the 
 ignorance or the treachery of their guides, and fell into diffi- 
 culties which would have caused some disorder among the 
 most regular and best disciplined troops. In this case such 
 disorder was fatal, and produced, as among men circumstanced 
 as Argyle's were, it necessarily must, an almost general dis- 
 persion. Wandering among bogs and morasses, disheartened 
 by fatigue, terrified by rumours of an approaching enemy, 
 the darkness of the night aggravating at once every real dis- 
 tress, and adding terror to every vain alarm; in this situation, 
 w r hen even the bravest and the best (for according to one 
 account Eumbold himself was missing for a time) were not 
 
 1 Lord FountainliaH's Memoirs, MS. Woodrow, 536. 
 
396 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 able to find their leaders, nor the corps to which they respec- 
 tively belonged; it is no wonder that many took this oppor- 
 tunity to abandon a cause now become desperate, and to effect 
 individually that escape which, as a body, they had no longer 
 any hopes to accomplish. 1 
 
 When the small remains of this ill-fated army got together, 
 in the morning, at Kilpatrick, a place far distant from their 
 destination, its number was reduced to less than five hundred. 
 Argyle had lost all authority; nor indeed, had he retained 
 any, does it appear that he could now have used it to any 
 salutary purpose. The same bias which had influenced the 
 two parties in the time of better hopes, and with regard to 
 their early operations, still prevailed, now that they were 
 driven to their last extremity. Sir Patrick Hume and sir 
 John Cochrane would not stay even to reason the matter with 
 him whom, at the onset of their expedition, they had engaged 
 to obey, but crossed the Clyde, with such as would follow 
 them, to the number of about two hundred, into Renfrew- 
 shire. 2 
 
 Argyle, thus deserted, and almost alone, still looked to his 
 own country as the sole remaining hope, and sent off sir 
 Duncan Campbell, with the two Duncansons, father and son, 
 persons all three, by whom he seemed to have been served 
 with the most exemplary zeal and fidelity, to attempt new 
 levies there. Having done this, and settled such means of 
 correspondence as the state of affairs would permit, he repaired 
 to the house of an old servant, upon whose attachment he had 
 relied for an asylum, but was peremptorily denied entrance. 
 Concealment in this part of the country seemed now imprac- 
 ticable, and he was forced at last to pass the Clyde, accompanied 
 by the brave and faithful Fullarton. Upon coming to a ford 
 of the Inchanon, they were stopped by some militia men. 
 Fullarton used in vain, all the best means which his presence 
 of mind suggested to him, to save his general. He attempted 
 one while by gentle, and then by harsher language, to detain 
 the commander of the party till the earl, who was habited as 
 a common countryman, and whom he passed for his guide, 
 should have made his escape. At last, when he saw them 
 determined to go after his pretended guide, he offered to sur- 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 535, 536. 2 lb. 535. 
 
1685.] INDIGNITIES OFFERED TO ARGYLE. 397 
 
 render himself without a blow, upon condition of their de- 
 sisting from their pursuit. This agreement was accepted, but 
 not adhered to, and two horsemen were detached to seize 
 Argyle. The earl, who was also on horseback, grappled with 
 them, till one of them and himself came to the ground. He 
 then presented his pocket pistols, on which the two retired, 
 but soon after five more came up, who fired without effect, 
 and he thought himself like to get rid of them, but they 
 knocked him down with their swords, and seized him. When 
 they knew whom they had taken, they seemed much troubled, 
 but dared not let him go. 1 Fullarton, perceiving that the 
 stipulation on which he had surrendered himself was violated, 
 and determined to defend himself to the last, or at least to 
 wreak, before he fell, his just vengeance upon his perfidious 
 opponents, grasped at the sword of one of them, but in vain; 
 he was overpowered, and made prisoner. 2 
 
 Argyle was immediately carried to Renfrew, thence to 
 Glasgow, and on the 20th of June was led in triumph into 
 Edinburgh. The order of the council was particular; that 
 he should be led bareheaded in the midst, of Graham's 
 guards, with their matches cocked, his hands tied behind his 
 back, and preceded by the common hangman, in which situa- 
 tion, that he might be more exposed to the insults and taunts 
 of the vulgar, it was directed that he should be carried to the 
 castle by a circuitous route. 3 To the equanimity with which 
 he bore these indignities, as indeed to the manly spirit 
 exhibited by him throughout, in these last scenes of his life, 
 ample testimony is borne by all the historians who have 
 treated of them, even those who are the least partial to him. 
 He had frequent opportunities of conversing, and some of 
 waiting, during his imprisonment, and it is from such parts- 
 of these conversations and writings as have been preserved 
 
 1 In my relation'of the taking of Argyle's person, I have followed his own 
 account, and mostly in his own words. As the authenticity of the paper 
 written in prison, wherein he gives this account, has never been called in 
 question, it seems strange that any historian should have adopted a different 
 one. I take no notice of the story, by which he is made to exclaim, in 
 falling, " Unfortunate Argyle !" and thus to discover himself. Besides 
 that there is no authority for it, it has not the air of a real fact, but rather 
 resembles a clumsy contrivance in some play, where the poet is put to his 
 last shift for means to produce a discovery necessary to his plot. 
 2 Woodrow, 536, 537. 3 i D . 538. 
 
398 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 to us, that we can best form to ourselves a just notion of his 
 deportment during that trying period; at the same time, a 
 true representation of the temper of his mind in such circum- 
 stances will serve, in no small degree, to illustrate his general 
 character and disposition. 
 
 We have already seen how he expresses himself with 
 regard to the men, who, by taking him, became the immediate 
 cause of his calamity. 1 He seems to feel a sort of gratitude 
 to them for the sorrow he saw, or fancied he saw in them, 
 when they knew who he was, and immediately suggests an 
 excuse for them, by saying, that they did not dare to follow 
 the impulse of their hearts. Speaking of the supineness of 
 his countrymen, and of the little assistance he had received 
 from them, he declares with his accustomed piety his resigna- 
 tion to the will of God, which was, that Scotland should not 
 be delivered at this time, nor especially by his hand; and 
 then exclaims, with the regret of a patriot, but with no 
 bitterness of disappointment, "But alas! who is there to be 
 delivered! There may," says he, " be hidden ones, but there 
 appears no great party in the country who desire to be 
 relieved." 2 Justice, in some degree, but still more, that warm 
 affection for his own kindred and vassals, which seems to have 
 formed a marked feature in this nobleman's character, then 
 induces him to make an exception in favour of his poor friends 
 in Argyleshire, in treating for whom, though in what part - 
 cular way does not appear, he was employing, and with some 
 hope of success, the few remaining hours of his life. In 
 recounting the failure of his expedition, it is impossible for 
 him not to touch upon what he deemed the misconduct of his 
 friends; and this is the subject upon which, of all others, his 
 temper must have been most irritable. A certain description 
 of friends (the words describing them are omitted) were all 
 of them, without exception, his greatest enemies, both to 
 
 betray and destroy him; and ..... and (the names 
 
 again omitted) were the greatest cause of his rout, and his 
 being taken, though not designedly, he acknowledges, but by 
 
 1 " As soon as they knew what I was, they seemed to be much troubled, 
 "but durst not let me go." Woodrow, 537. In another paper, he says, 
 " Of the militia who wounded and took me, some wept, but durst not let me 
 go." Id. 538. Supra, 205. — Ed. 
 
 2 Woodrow, 538. 
 
1685.] ARGYLE THREATENED WITH TORTURE. 399 
 
 ignorance, cowardice, and faction. 1 This sentence had scarce 
 escaped him, when, notwithstanding the qualifying words 
 with which his candour had acquitted the last-mentioned 
 persons of intentional treachery, it appeared too harsh to his 
 gentle nature, and declaring himself displeased with the hard 
 epithets 2 he had used, he desires they may be put out of any 
 account that is to be given of these transactions. The manner 
 in which this request is worded, shows that the paper he was 
 writing was intended for a letter, and as it is supposed, to a 
 Mrs. Smith, who seems to have assisted him with money; but 
 whether or not this lady was the rich widow of Amsterdam, 
 before alluded to, I have not been able to learn. 
 
 When he is told that he is to be put to the torture, he 
 neither breaks out into any high-sounding bravado, any pre- 
 mature vaunts of the resolution with which he will endure it, 
 nor, on the other hand, into passionate exclamations on the 
 cruelty of his enemies, or unmanly lamentations of his fate. 
 After stating that orders were arrived, that he must be tor- 
 tured, unless he answers all questions upon oath, he simply 
 adds, that he hopes God will support him; and then leaves oif 
 writing, not from any want of spirits to proceed, but to enjoy 
 the consolation which was yet left him, in the society of his 
 wife, the countess being just then admitted. 
 
 Of his interview with Queensbury, who examined him in 
 private, little is known, except that he denied his design 
 having been concerted with any persons in Scotland; that he 
 gave no information with respect to his associates in England; 
 and that he boldly and frankly averred his hopes to have been 
 founded on the cruelty of the administration, and such a dis- 
 
 1 " friends were our greatest enemies, all without exception, 
 
 both to betray and destroy us ; and indeed and were the 
 
 greatest cause of our rout, and (of) my being taken ; though not designedly, 
 I acknowledge, yet by ignorance, cowardice, and faction." 
 
 2 " I am not pleased with myself. I have such hard epithets of some of 
 my countrymen, seeing they are Christians ; pray put it out of any account 
 you give ; only I must acknowledge they were not governable, and the 
 humour you found begun continued." Woodrow, ii. 538. After an inef- 
 fectual research to discover the original MS., Mr. Fox observes, in a letter, 
 *' Cochrane and Hume certainly filled up the two principal blanks ; with re- 
 spect to the other blank, it is more difficult, but neither is it very material.'* 
 Accordingly, the blanks in the text, and in the preceding note, may be 
 filled up thus, " {Cochrane 's) friends were our greatest enemies," &c, " and 
 indeed Hume and Cochrane were the greatest cause of our rout," &c. 
 
400 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 position in the people to revolt, as he conceived to be the 
 natural consequence of oppression. He owned at the same 
 time, that he had trusted too much to this principle. 1 The 
 precise date of this conversation, whether it took place before 
 the threat of the torture, whilst that threat was impending, 
 or when there was no longer any intention of putting it into 
 execution, I have not been able to ascertain; but the proba- 
 bility seems to be, that it was during the first or second of 
 these periods. 
 
 Notwithstanding the ill success that had attended his enter- 
 prise, he never expresses, or even hints, the smallest degree of 
 contrition for having undertaken it: on the contrary, when 
 Mr. Charteris, an eminent divine, is permitted to wait on him, 
 his first caution to that minister is, not to try to convince him 
 of the unlawfulness of his attempt, concerning which his 
 opinion was settled, and his mind made up. 2 Of some parts 
 of his past conduct he does indeed confess that he repents, but 
 these are the compliances of which he had been guilty in sup- 
 port of the king, or his predecessors. Possibly in this he may 
 allude to his having in his youth borne arms against the cove- 
 nant, but with more likelihood to his concurrence, in the late 
 reign, with some of the measures of Lauderdale's administra- 
 tion, for whom it is certain that he entertained a great regard, 
 and to whom he conceived himself to be principally indebted 
 for his escape from his first sentence. Friendship and grati- 
 tude might have carried him to lengths which patriotism and 
 justice must condemn. 
 
 Religious concerns, in which he seems to have been very 
 serious and sincere, engaged much of his thoughts; but his 
 religion was of that genuine kind, w r hich by representing the 
 performance of our duties to our neighbour as the most ac- 
 ceptable service to God, strengthens all the charities of social 
 life. While he anticipates, with a hope approaching to cer- 
 tainty, a happy futurity, he does not forget those who have 
 been justly dear to him in this world. He writes, on the day 
 of his execution, to his wife, and to some other relations, for 
 whom he seems to have entertained a sort of parental tender- 
 ness, short but the most affectionate letters, wherein he gives 
 them the greatest satisfaction then in his power, by assuring 
 
 1 Burnet, ii. 315. 2 Burnet. 
 
1685.] HIS LAST DAYS. 401 
 
 them of his composure and tranquillity of mind, and refers 
 them for further consolations to those sources from which he 
 derived his own. In his letter to Mrs. Smith, written on the 
 same day, he says, " While anything was a burden to me, 
 your concern was; which is a cross greater than I can ex- 
 press," (alluding, probably, to the pecuniary loss she had in- 
 curred,) "but I have, I thank God, overcome all." 1 Her 
 name, he adds, could not be concealed, and that he knows not 
 what may have been discovered from any paper which may 
 have been taken; otherwise he has named none to their dis- 
 advantage. He states that those in whose hands he is, had 
 at first used him hardly, but that God had melted their hearts, 
 and that he was now treated with civility. As an instance 
 of this, he mentions the liberty he had obtained of sending 
 this letter to her; a liberty which he takes as a kindness on 
 their part, and which he had sought that she might not think 
 he had forgotten her. 
 
 Never, perhaps, did a few sentences present so striking a 
 picture of a mind truly virtuous and honourable. Heroic 
 courage is the least part of his praise, and vanishes as it were 
 from our sight, when we contemplate the sensibility with 
 which he acknowledges the kindness, such as it is, of the very 
 men who are leading him to the scaffold; the generous satis- 
 faction which he feels on reflecting that no confession of his 
 has endangered his associates; and above all, his anxiety, in 
 such moments, to perform all the duties of friendship and 
 gratitude, not only with the most scrupulous exactness, but 
 with the most considerate attention to the feelings as well as 
 to the interests of the person who was the object of them. 
 Indeed, it seems throughout, to have been the peculiar feli- 
 city of this man's mind, that everything was present to it that 
 ought to be so; nothing that ought not. Of his country he 
 could not be unmindful; and it was one among other conse- 
 quences of his happy temper, that on this subject he did not 
 entertain those gloomy ideas, which the then state of Scotland 
 was but too well fitted to inspire. In a conversation with an 
 intimate friend, he says, that though he does not take upon 
 him to be a prophet, he doubts not but that deliverance will 
 come, and suddenly, of which his failings had rendered him 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 541, 542. 
 
 D D 
 
402 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 unworthy to be the instrument. In some verses which he 
 composed on the night preceding his execution, and which he 
 intended for his epitaph, he thus expresses this hope still more 
 distinctly: 
 
 " On my attempt though Providence did frown, 
 His oppressed people God at length shall own ; 
 Another hand, by more successful speed, 
 Shall raise the remnant, bruise the serpent's head." 
 
 With respect to the epitaph itself, of which these lines form 
 a part, it is probable that he composed it chiefly with a view 
 to amuse and relieve his mind, fatigued with exertion, and 
 partly, perhaps, in imitation of the famous marquis of Mon- 
 trose, who, in similar circumstances, had written some verses 
 which have been much celebrated. The poetical merit of the 
 pieces appears to be nearly equal, and is not in either instance 
 considerable, and they are only in so far valuable, as they 
 may serve to convey to us some image of the minds by which 
 they were produced. He who reads them with this view, 
 will, perhaps, be of opinion, that the spirit manifested in the 
 two compositions, is rather equal in degree than like in cha- 
 racter; that the courage of Montrose was more turbulent, that 
 of Argyle more calm and sedate. If, on the one hand, it is 
 to be regretted that we have not more memorials left of pas- 
 sages so interesting, and that even of those which we do pos- 
 sess, a great part is obscured by time, it must be confessed, 
 on the other, that we have quite enough to enable us to pro- 
 nounce, that for constancy and equanimity under the severest 
 trials, few men have equalled, none ever surpassed, the earl of 
 Argyle. The most powerful of all tempters, hope, was not 
 held out to him, so that he had not, it is true, in addition 
 to his other hard tasks, that of resisting her seductive in- 
 fluence; but the passions of a different class had the fullest 
 scope for their attacks. These, however, could make no im- 
 pression on his well-disciplined mind. Anger could not ex- 
 asperate, fear could not appal him; and if disappointment and 
 indignation at the misbehaviour of his followers, and the su- 
 pineness of the country, did occasionally, as sure they must, 
 cause uneasy sensations, they had not the power to extort 
 from him one unbecoming, or even querulous expression. 
 JLet him be weighed never so scrupulously, and in the nicest 
 
1685.] AN ADDRESS AGAINST HIM. 403 
 
 scales, he will not be found, in a single instance, wanting in 
 the charity of a Christian, the firmness and benevolence of a 
 patriot, the integrity and fidelity of a man of honour. 
 
 The Scotch parliament had, on the 1 1th of June, sent an 
 address to the king, wherein, after praising his majesty, as 
 usual, for his extraordinary prudence, courage, and conduct, 
 and loading Argyle, whom they styled an hereditary traitor, 
 with every reproach they can devise, among others, that of 
 ingratitude for the favours which he had received, as well 
 from his majesty as from his predecessor, they implore his 
 majesty that the earl may find no favour, and that the earl's 
 family, the heritors, ringleaders, and preachers who joined 
 him, should be for ever declared incapable of mercy, or bear- 
 ing any honour or estate in the kingdom, and all subjects 
 discharged under the highest pains to intercede for them in 
 any manner of way. Never was address more graciously re- 
 ceived, or more readily complied with ; and, accordingly, the 
 following letter, with the royal signature, and countersigned 
 by lord Melford, secretary of state for Scotland, was dis- 
 patched to the council at Edinburgh, and by them entered 
 and registered on the 29th of June. 
 
 " Whereas, the late earl of Argyle is, by the providence of 
 God, fallen into our power, it is our wall and pleasure that 
 you take all ways to know from him those things which con- 
 cern our government most, as his assisters with men, arms, 
 and money, his associates and correspondents, his designs, &c. 
 But this must be done, so as no time may be lost in bringing 
 him to condign punishment, by causing him to be demeaned 
 as a traitor, within the space of three days after this shall 
 come to your hands, an account of which, with what he shall 
 confess, you shall send immediately to us or our secretaries, 
 for doing which this shall be your w arrant." 1 
 
 When it is recollected that torture had been in common use 
 in Scotland, and that the persons to whom the letter was ad- 
 dressed had often caused it to be inflicted, the words " It is 
 our will and pleasure that you take all ways," seem to con- 
 vey a positive command for applying of it in this instance; yet 
 it is certain that Argyle was not tortured. What was the 
 cause of this seeming disregard of the royal injunctions does 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 039. 
 
 D D 2 
 
404 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 not appear. One would hope, for the honour of human 
 nature, that James, struck with some compunction for the 
 injuries he had already heaped upon the head of this unfor- 
 tunate nobleman, sent some private orders contradictory to 
 this public letter; but there is no trace to be discovered of 
 such a circumstance. The managers themselves might feel a 
 sympathy for a man of their own rank, which had no in- 
 fluence in the cases where only persons of an inferior station 
 were to be the sufferers; and in those words of the king's 
 letter, which enjoin a speedy punishment as the primary 
 object to which all others must give way, they might find a 
 pretext for overlooking the most odious part of the order, and 
 of indulging their humanity, such as it was, by appointing the 
 earliest day possible for the execution. In order that the 
 triumph of injustice might be complete, it was determined that, 
 without any new trial, the earl should suffer upon the ini- 
 quitous sentence of 1682. Accordingly, the very next day 
 ensuing was appointed, and on the 13th of June he was 
 brought from the castle, first to the Laigh Council-house, and 
 thence to the place of execution. 
 
 Before he left the castle, he had his dinner at the usual 
 hour, at which he discoursed, not only calmly, but even 
 cheerfully, with Mr. Charteris and others. After dinner he 
 retired, as was his custom, to his bed-chamber, where, it is 
 recorded, that he slept quietly for about a quarter of an hour. 
 While he was in his bed, one of the members of the council 
 came and intimated to the attendants a desire to speak with 
 him: upon being told that the earl was asleep, and had left 
 orders not to be disturbed, the manager disbelieved the 
 account, which he considered as a device to avoid further 
 questionings. To satisfy him, the door of the bed-chamber was 
 half opened, and he then beheld, enjoying a sweet and tran- 
 quil slumber, the man, who by the doom of him and his fellows, 
 w r as to die within the space of two short hours! Struck with 
 this sight, he hurried out of the room, quitted the castle with 
 the utmost precipitation, and hid himself in the lodgings of 
 an acquaintance who lived near, w T here he flung himself upon 
 the first bed that presented itself, and had every appearance 
 of a man suffering the most excruciating torture. His friend, 
 who had been apprised by the servant of the state he was in, 
 and who naturally concluded that he was ill, offered him 
 
1685.] TRANQUILLITY OF HIS LAST MOMENTS. 405 
 
 some wine. He refused, saying, " INo, no, that will not help 
 me: I have been in at Argyle, and saw him sleeping as 
 pleasantly as ever man did, within an hour of eternity. But 
 
 as for me " l The name of the person to whom this 
 
 anecdote relates is not mentioned, and the truth of it may 
 therefore be fairly considered as liable to that degree of doubt 
 with which men of judgment receive every species of tradi- 
 tional history. Woodrow, however, whose veracity is above 
 suspicion, says he had it from the most unquestionable autho- 
 rity. It is not in itself unlikely; and who is there that 
 would not wish it true? What a satisfactory spectacle to a 
 philosophical mind, to see the oppressor, in the zenith of his 
 power, envying his victim! What an acknowledgment of 
 the superiority of virtue! What an affecting and forcible tes- 
 timony to the value of that peace of mind, which innocence 
 alone can confer! We know not who this man was; but 
 when we reflect that the guilt which agonized him was pro- 
 bably incurred for the sake of some vain title, or, at least, of 
 some increase of wealth, which he did not want, and possibly 
 knew not how to enjoy, our disgust is turned into something 
 like compassion for that very foolish class of men, whom the 
 world calls wise in their generation. 
 
 Soon after his short repose Argyle was brought, according 
 to order, to the Laigh Council-house, from which place is 
 dated the letter to his wife, and thence to the place of execu- 
 tion. On the scaffold he had some discourse, as well with 
 Mr. Annand, a minister appointed by government to attend 
 him, as with Mr. Charteris. He desired both of them to pray 
 for him, and prayed himself with much fervency and devo- 
 tion. The speech which he made to the people was such 
 as might be expected from the passages already related. The 
 same mixture of firmness and mildness is conspicuous in 
 every part of it. " We ought not," says he, " to despise 
 our afflictions, nor to faint under them. We must not suffer 
 ourselves to be exasperated against the instruments of our 
 troubles, nor by fraudulent, nor pusillanimous compliances, 
 bring guilt upon ourselves; faint hearts are ordinarily false 
 hearts, choosing sin, rather than suffering." He offers his 
 prayers to God for the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, 
 
 1 Woodrow, ii. 541. 
 
406 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 and Ireland, and that an end may be put to their present 
 trials. Having then asked pardon for his own failings, both 
 of God and man, he would have concluded; but being re- 
 minded that he had said nothing of the royal family, he adds, 
 that he refers, in this matter, to what he had said at his trial 
 concerning the test; that he prayed there never might be 
 wanting one of the royal family to support the protestant 
 religion; and if any of them had swerved from the true faith, 
 he prayed God to turn their hearts, but, at any rate, to save 
 his people from their machinations. When he had ended, he 
 turned to the south side of the scaffold, and said, " Gentle- 
 men, I pray you do not misconstruct my behaviour this day: 
 I freely forgive all men their wrongs and injuries done 
 against me, as I desire to be forgiven of God." Mr. An- 
 nand repeated these words louder to the people. The earl 
 then went to the north side of the scaffold, and used the 
 same or the like expressions. Mr. Ann and repeated them 
 again, and said, " This nobleman dies a protestant." The 
 earl stepped forward again, and said, " I die not only a pro- 
 testant, but with a heart-hatred of popery, -prelacy, and all 
 superstition whatsomever." 1 It would perhaps have been 
 better if these last expressions had never been uttered, as 
 there appears certainly something of violence in them unsuit- 
 able to the general tenor of his language; but it must be 
 remembered, first, that the opinion that the pope is anti- 
 christ was at that time general among almost all the zealous 
 protestants in these kingdoms; secondly, that Annand, being 
 employed by government, and probably an episcopalian, the 
 earl might apprehend that the declaration of such a minister 
 might not convey the precise idea, which he, Argyle, affixed 
 to the word protestant. 
 
 He then embraced his friends, gave some tokens of re- 
 membrance to his son-in-law, lord Maitland, for his daughter 
 and grandchildren, stripped himself of part of his apparel, of 
 which he likewise made presents, and laid his head upon the 
 block. Having uttered a short prayer, he gave the signal to 
 the executioner, which was instantly obeyed, and his head 
 severed from his body. 2 Such were the last hours, and such 
 the final close, of this great man's life. May the like happy 
 serenity in such dreadful circumstances, and a death equally 
 
 3 Woodrow, 543, 545. 2 lb. 
 
1685.] FATE OF HIS FOLLOWERS. 407 
 
 glorious, be the lot of all whom tyranny, of whatever denomi- 
 nation or description, shall in any age, or in any country, call 
 to expiate their virtues on the scaffold! 
 
 Of the followers of Argyle, in the disastrous expedition 
 above recounted, the fortunes were various. Among those 
 who either surrendered or were taken, some suffered the same 
 fate with their commander, others were pardoned; while, on 
 the other hand, of those who escaped to foreign parts, many 
 after a short exile returned triumphantly to their country at 
 the period of the revolution, and under a system congenial to 
 their principles, some even attained the highest honours 
 of the state. It is to be recollected, that when, after the 
 disastrous night-march from Killerne, a separation took 
 place at Kilpatrick between Argyle and his confederates, sir 
 John Cochrane, sir Patrick Hume, and others, crossed the 
 Clyde into Renfrewshire, with about, it is supposed, two 
 hundred men. Upon their landing, they met with some 
 opposition from a troop of militia horse, which was, however, 
 feeble and ineffectual; but fresh parties of militia, as well as 
 regular troops drawing together, a sort of scuffle ensued, near 
 a place called Muirdyke; an offer of quarter was made by 
 the king's troops, but (probably on account of the conditions 
 annexed to it) was refused; and Cochrane and the rest, now 
 reduced to the number of seventy, took shelter in a fold-dyke, 
 where they were able to resist and repel, though not without 
 loss on each side, the attack of the enemy. Their situation 
 was nevertheless still desperate, and in the night they deter- 
 mined to make their escape. The king's troops having 
 retired, this was effected without difficulty; and this remnant 
 of an army being dispersed by common consent, every man 
 sought his own safety in the best manner he could. Sir 
 John Cochrane took refuge in the house of an uncle, by whom, 
 or by whose wife, it is said, he was betrayed. He was, how- 
 ever, pardoned; and from this circumstance, coupled with the 
 constant and seemingly peevish opposition which he gave to 
 almost all Argyle's plans, a suspicion has arisen, that he had 
 been treacherous throughout. But the account given of his 
 pardon by Burnet, who says his father, lord Dundonald, who 
 was an opulent nobleman, purchased it with a considerable sum 
 of money, 1 is more credible, as well as more candid; and it 
 
 i Burnet, ii. 31G. 
 
408 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 must be remembered, that in sir John's disputes with his 
 general, he was almost always acting in conjunction with sir 
 Patrick Hume, who is proved, by the subsequent events, and 
 indeed by the whole tenour of his life and conduct, to have 
 been uniformly sincere and zealous in the cause of his country. 
 Cochrane was sent to England, where he had an interview 
 with the king, and gave such answers to the questions put to 
 him, as were deemed satisfactory by his majesty; and the 
 information thus obtained, whatever might be the real and 
 secret causes, furnished a plausible pretence at least for the 
 exercise of royal mercy. Sir Patrick Hume, after having 
 concealed himself some time in the house, and under the pro- 
 tection, of lady Eleanor Dunbar, sister to the earl of Egling- 
 ton, found means to escape to Holland, whence he returned 
 in better times, and was created first lord Hume of Polwarth, 
 and afterward earl of Marchmont. Fullarton, and Campbell 
 of Auchinbreak, appear to have escaped, but by what means 
 is not known. Two sons of Argyle, John and Charles, and 
 Archibald Campbell, his nephew, were sentenced to death 
 and forfeiture, but the capital part of the sentence was 
 remitted. Thomas Archer, a clergyman, who had been 
 wounded at Muirdyke, was executed, notwithstanding many 
 applications in his favour, among which was one from lord 
 Drumlanrig, Queensbury's eldest son. Woodrow, who was 
 himself a presbyterian minister, and though a most valuable 
 and correct historian, w T as not without a tincture of the pre- 
 judices belonging to his order, attributes the unrelenting 
 spirit of the government in this instance, to their malice 
 against the clergy of his sect. Some of the holy ministry, 
 he observes, as Guthrie at the restoration, Kidd and Mackail 
 after the insurrections at Pentland and Bothwell Bridge, and 
 now Archer, were upon every occasion to be sacrificed to the 
 fury of the persecutors. 1 But to him who is well acquainted 
 with the history of this period, the habitual cruelty of the 
 government will fully account for any particular act of 
 severity; and it is only in cases of lenity — such as that of 
 Cochrane, for instance — that he will look for some hidden or 
 special motive. 
 
 Ayloff, having in vain attempted to kill himself, was, like 
 
 1 Woodrow, 553. 
 
1685.] RUMBOLD. 409 
 
 Cochrane, sent to London to be examined. His relationship 
 to the king's first wife might perhaps be one inducement to 
 this measure, or it might be thought more expedient that he 
 should be executed for the Eye House plot, the credit of 
 which it was a favourite object of the court to uphold, than 
 for his recent acts of rebellion in Scotland. Upon his ex- 
 amination he refused to give any information, and suffered 
 death upon a sentence of outlawry, which had passed in the 
 former reign. It is recorded, that James interrogated him 
 personally, and finding him sullen, and unwilling to speak, 
 said: "Mr. Ayloff, you know it is in my power to pardon 
 you, therefore say that which may deserve it:" to which 
 Ayloff replied: " Though it is in your power, it is not in 
 your nature to pardon." This, however, is one of those 
 anecdotes, which is believed rather on account of the air of 
 nature that belongs to them, than upon any very good tra- 
 ditional authority, and which ought, therefore, when any very 
 material inference, with respect either to fact or character, 
 is to be drawn from them, to be received with great caution. 
 Rumbold, covered with wounds, and defending himself 
 with uncommon exertions of strength and courage, was at 
 last taken. However desirable it might have been thought, 
 to execute in England a man so deeply implicated in the Rye 
 House plot, the state of Rumbold's health made such a project 
 impracticable. Had it been attempted, he would probably, 
 by a natural death, have disappointed the views of a govern- 
 ment who were eager to see brought to the block, a man 
 whom they thought, or pretended to think, guilty of having 
 projected the assassination of the late and present king. 
 Weakened as he was in body, his mind was firm, his con- 
 stancy unshaken; and notwithstanding some endeavours that 
 were made, by drums and other instruments, to drown his 
 voice when he was addressing the people from the scaffold, 
 enough has been preserved of what he then uttered, to satisfy 
 us, that his personal courage, the praise of which has not 
 been denied him, was not of the vulgar or constitutional kind, 
 but was accompanied with a proportionable vigour of mind. 
 Upon hearing his sentence, whether in imitation of Montrose, 
 or from that congeniality of character, which causes men in 
 similar circumstances to conceive similar sentiments, he 
 expressed the same wish which that gallant nobleman had 
 
410 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 done; he wished he had a limb for every town in Christen- 
 dom. With respect to the intended assassination imputed to 
 him, he protested his innocence, and desired to be believed 
 upon the faith of a dying man; adding, in terms as natural as 
 they are forcibly descriptive of a conscious dignity of cha- 
 racter, that he was too well known, for any to have had the 
 imprudence to make such a proposition to him. He concluded 
 with plain, and apparently sincere, declarations of his un- 
 diminished attachment to the principles of liberty, civil and 
 religious; denied that he was an enemy to monarchy, affirm- 
 ing, on the contrary, that he considered it, when properly 
 limited, as the most eligible form of government ; but that he 
 never could believe that any man was born marked by God 
 above another, " for none comes into the world with a saddle 
 on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him." 1 
 
 Except by Ralph, who, w r ith a warmth that does honour to 
 his feelings, expatiates at some length upon the subject, the 
 circumstances attending the death of this extraordinary man 
 have been little noticed. Rapin, Echard, Kennet, Hume, 
 make no mention of them whatever; and yet, exclusively of 
 the interest always excited by any great display of spirit and 
 magnanimity, his solemn denial of the project of assassination 
 imputed to him in the affair of the Rye House plot, is in itself 
 a fact of great importance, and one which might have been 
 expected to attract, in no small degree, the attention of the 
 historian. That Hume, who has taken some pains in canvass- 
 ing the degree of credit due to the different parts of the Rye 
 House plot, should pass it over in silence, is the more extraor- 
 dinary, because, in the case of the popish plot, he lays, and 
 justly lays, the greatest stress upon the dying declarations of 
 the sufferers. Burnet adverts, as well to the peculiar 
 language used by Rumbold, as to his denial of the assassina- 
 tion; but having before given us to understand that he be- 
 lieved that no such crime had been projected, it is the less to 
 be wondered at that he does not much dwell upon this further 
 evidence in favour of his former opinion. Sir John Dalrymple, 
 upon the authority of a paper which he does not produce, 
 but from which he quotes enough to show, that if produced 
 it would not answer his purpose, takes Rumbold's guilt for a 
 
 1 RaJpli, i. 872. 
 
1685.] INQUIRY INTO THE RYE HOUSE PLOT. 411 
 
 decided fact, and then states his dying protestations of his 
 innocence, as an instance of aggravated wickedness. 1 It is 
 to be remarked, too, that although sir John is pleased roundly 
 to assert, that Rumbold denied the share he had had in the 
 Eye House plot, yet the particular words which he cites 
 neither contain, nor express, nor imply any such denial. He 
 has not even selected those by which the design of assassina- 
 tion was denied, (the only denial that was uttered,) but refers 
 to a general declaration made by Rumbold, that he had done 
 injustice to no man — a declaration which was by no means 
 inconsistent with his having been a party to a plot, which he, 
 no doubt, considered as justifiable, and even meritorious. 
 This is not all: the paper referred to is addressed to "Walcot, 
 hj whom Rumbold states himself to have been led on; and 
 Walcot, w r ith his last breath, denied his own participation in 
 any design to murder either Charles or James. Thus, there- 
 fore, Avhether the declaration of the sufferer be interpreted in 
 a general or in a particular sense, there is no contradiction 
 whatever between it and the paper adduced; but thus it is 
 that the character of a brave and, as far as appears, a virtuous 
 man, is most unjustly and cruelly traduced. An incredible 
 confusion of head, and an uncommon want of reasoning 
 powers, which distinguish the author to whom I refer, are, I 
 should charitably hope, the true sources of his misrepresenta- 
 tion; while others may probably impute it to his desire of 
 blackening, upon any pretence, a person whose name is more 
 or less connected with those of Sidney and Russell. It ought 
 not, perhaps, to pass without observation, that this attack 
 upon Rumbold is introduced only in an oblique manner: the 
 rigour of government destroyed, says the historian, the morals 
 it intended to correct, and made the unhappy sufferer add to 
 his former crimes, the atrocity of declaring a falsehood in his 
 last moments. Now, what particular instances of rigour are 
 here alluded to, it is difficult to guess: for surely the execu- 
 tion of a man whom he sets down as guilty of a design to 
 murder the two royal brothers, could not, even in the judg- 
 ment of persons much less accustomed than sir John to palliate 
 the crimes of princes, be looked upon as an act of blameable 
 severity; but it was thought, perhaps, that for the purpose of 
 
 1 Dalrymple's Memoirs, i. 141. 
 
412 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 conveying a calumny upon the persons concerned, or accused 
 of being concerned, in the Rye House plot, an affected censure 
 upon the government would be the fittest vehicle. 
 
 The fact itself, that Rumbold did, in his last hours, solemnly 
 deny the having been concerned in any project for assassi- 
 nating the king or duke, has not, I believe, been questioned. 1 
 It is not invalidated by the silence of some historians: it is 
 confirmed by the misrepresentation of others. The first 
 question that naturally presents itself, must be, was this de- 
 claration true? The asseverations of dying men have always 
 had, and will always have, great influence upon the minds of 
 those who do not push their ill opinion of mankind to the 
 most outrageous and unwarrantable length; but though the 
 weight of such asseverations be in all cases great, it will not 
 be in all equal. It is material therefore to consider, first, 
 what are the circumstances which may tend in particular 
 cases to diminish their credit; and next, how far such circum- 
 stances appear to have existed in the case before us. The case 
 where this species of evidence would be the least convincing, 
 would be where hope of pardon is entertained; for then the 
 man is not a dying man in the sense of the proposition, for 
 lie has not that certainty that his falsehood will not avail him, 
 which is the principal foundation of the credit due to his 
 assertions. For the same reason, though in a less degree, he 
 who hopes for favour to his children, or to other surviving 
 connexions, is to be listened to with some caution; for the 
 existence of one virtue does not necessarily prove that of 
 another, and he who loves his children and friends may yet 
 be profligate and unprincipled; or, deceiving himself, may 
 think that while his ends are laudable, he ought not to hesitate 
 concerning the means. Beside these more obvious temptations 
 to prevarication, there is another which, though it may lie 
 somewhat deeper, yet experience teaches us to be rooted in 
 human nature: I mean that sort of obstinacy, or false shame, 
 which makes men so unwilling to retract what they have once 
 advanced, whether in matter of opinion or of fact. The 
 general character of the man is also in this, as in all other 
 human testimony, a circumstance of the greatest moment. 
 
 1 It is confirmed beyond contradiction by lord Fountainliall's account of 
 his trial and execution. 
 
1685.] INQUIRY INTO THE RYE HOUSE PLOT. 413 
 
 Where none of the above mentioned objections occur, and 
 where therefore the weight of evidence in question is con- 
 fessedly considerable, yet is it still liable to be balanced or 
 outweighed by evidence in the opposite scale. 
 
 Let Rumbold's declaration, then, be examined upon these 
 principles, and we shall find that it has every character of 
 truth, without a single circumstance to discredit it. He was 
 so far from entertaining any hope of pardon, that he did not 
 seem even to wish it; and indeed if he had had any such 
 chimerical object in view, he must have known that to have 
 supplied the government with a proof of the Rye House 
 assassination plot, would be a more likely road at least, than 
 a steady denial, to obtain it. He left none behind him for 
 whom to entreat favour, or whose welfare or honour were at 
 all affected by any confession or declaration he might make. 
 If, in a prospective view, he was without temptation, so 
 neither, if he looked back, was he fettered by any former 
 declaration; so that he could not be influenced by that erro- 
 neous notion of consistency, to which, it may be feared, that 
 truth, even in the most awful moments, has in some cases 
 been sacrificed. His timely escape in 1683, had saved him 
 from the necessity of making any protestation upon the subject 
 of his innocence at that time; and the words of the letter to 
 Walcot are so far from containing such a protestation, that 
 they are quoted (very absurdly, it is true,) by sir John 
 Dalrymple, as an avowal of guilt. If his testimony is free 
 from these particular objections, much less is it impeached by 
 his general character, which was that of a bold and daring 
 man, who was very unlikely to feel shame in avowing what 
 he had not been ashamed to commit, and who seems to have 
 taken a delight in speaking bold truths, or at least what 
 appeared to him to be such, without regarding the manner in 
 which his hearers were likely to receive them. With respect 
 to the last consideration, that of the opposite evidence, it all 
 depends upon the veracity of men who, according to their 
 own account, betrayed their comrades, and were actuated by 
 the hope either of pardon or reward. 
 
 It appears to be of the more consequence to clear up this 
 matter, because, if we should be of opinion, as I think we all 
 must be, that the story of the intended assassination of the 
 king, in his way from Newmarket, is as fabulous as that of 
 
414 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 the silver bullets by which he was to have been shot at 
 Windsor, a most singular train of reflections will force itself 
 upon our minds, as well in regard to the character of the 
 times, as to the means by which the two causes gained suc- 
 cessively the advantage over each other. The royalists had 
 found it impossible to discredit the fiction, gross as it was, of 
 the popish plot; nor could they prevent it from being a 
 powerful engine in the hands of the whigs, who during the 
 alarm raised by it, gained an irresistible superiority in the 
 house of commons, in the city of London, and in most parts 
 of the kingdom. But they who could not quiet a false alarm 
 raised by their adversaries, found little or no difficulty in 
 raising one equally false in their own favour, by the supposed 
 detection of the intended assassination. With regard to the 
 advantages derived to the respective parties from those de- 
 testable fictions, if it be urged, on one hand, that the panic 
 spread by the whigs was more universal and more violent in 
 its effects, it must be allowed, on the other, that the advantages 
 gained by the tories were, on account of their alliance with the 
 crown, more durable and decisive. There is a superior solidity 
 ever belonging to the power of the crown, as compared with 
 that of any body of men or party, or even with either of the 
 other branches of the legislature. A party has influence, but, 
 properly speaking, no power. The houses of parliament 
 have abundance of power, but, as bodies, little or no influence. 
 The crown has both power and influence, which, when exerted 
 with wisdom and steadiness, will always be found too strong 
 for any opposition whatever, till the zeal and fidelity of party 
 attachments shall be found to increase in proportion to the 
 increased influence of the executive power. 
 
 While these matters were transacting in Scotland, Mon- 
 mouth, conformably to his promise to Argyle, set sail from 
 Holland, and landed at Lyme in Dorsetshire, on the 11th of 
 June. He was attended by lord Grey of Wark, Fletcher of 
 Saltoun, colonel Matthews, Ferguson, and a few other gentle- 
 men. His reception was, among the lower ranks, cordial, 
 and for some days at least, if not weeks, there seemed to 
 have been more foundation for the sanguine hopes of lord 
 Grey and others, his followers, than the duke had supposed. 
 The first step taken by the invader, was to issue a proclama- 
 tion, which he caused to be read in the market-place. In 
 
1685.] monmouth's invasion. 415 
 
 this instrument he touched upon what were, no doubt, thought 
 to be the most popular topics, and loaded James and his 
 catholic friends with every imputation which had at any time 
 been thrown against them. This declaration appears to have 
 been well received, and the numbers that came in to him 
 were very considerable; but his means of arming them were 
 limited, nor had he much confidence, for the purpose of any 
 important military operation, in men unused to discipline, 
 and wholly unacquainted with the art of war. Without 
 examining the question whether or not Monmouth, from his 
 professional prejudices, carried, as some have alleged he did, 
 his diffidence of unpractised soldiers and new levies too far, 
 it seems clear that, in his situation, the best, or rather the 
 only chance of success, was to be looked for in counsels of 
 the boldest kind. If he could not immediately strike some 
 important stroke, it was not likely that he ever should; nor 
 indeed was he in a condition to wait. He could not flatter 
 himself, as Argyle had done, that he had a strong country, 
 full of relations and dependants, wdiere he might secure him- 
 self till the co-operation of his confederate or some other 
 favourable circumstance might put it in his power to act 
 more efficaciously. Of any brilliant success in Scotland he 
 could not, at this time, entertain any hope, nor if he had, 
 could he rationally expect that any events in that quarter 
 would make the sort of impression here, which, on the other 
 hand, Ins success would produce in Scotland. With money 
 he was wholly unprovided; nor does it appear, whatever may 
 have been the inclination of some considerable men, such as 
 lords Macclesfield, Brandon, Delamere, and others, that any 
 persons of that description were engaged to join in his enter- 
 prise. His reception had been above Ins hopes, and his 
 recruits more numerous than could be expected, or than he 
 was able to furnish with arms; while, on the other hand, the 
 forces in arms against him consisted chiefly in a militia, for- 
 midable neither from numbers nor discipline, and moreover 
 suspected of disaffection. The present moment, therefore, 
 seemed to offer the most favourable opportunity for enterprise 
 of any that was like to occur; but the unfortunate Monmouth 
 judged otherwise, and, as if he were to defend rather than to 
 attack, directed his chief policy to the avoiding of a general 
 action. 
 
416 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 It being, however, absolutely necessary to dislodge some 
 troops which the earl of Feversham had thrown into Bridport, 
 a detachment of three hundred men was made for that pur- 
 pose, which had the most complete success, notwithstanding 
 the cowardice of lord Grey, who commanded them. This 
 nobleman, who had been so instrumental in persuading his 
 friend to the invasion, upon the first appearance of danger is 
 said to have left the troops whom he commanded, and to have 
 sought his own personal safety in flight. The troops carried 
 Bridport, to the shame of the commander who had deserted 
 them, and returned to Lyme. 
 
 It is related by Ferguson, that Monmouth said to Matthews, 
 " What shall I do with lord Grey?" to which the other 
 answered, " That he was the only general in Europe who 
 would ask such a question;" intending, no doubt, to reproach 
 the duke with the excess to which he pushed his characteristic 
 virtues of mildness and forbearance. That these virtues 
 formed a part of his character, is most true, and the personal 
 friendship in which he had lived with Grey would incline 
 him still more to the exercise of them upon this occasion; 
 but it is to be remembered also, that the delinquent was, in 
 respect of rank, property, and perhaps too of talent, by far 
 the most considerable man he had with him; and therefore, 
 that prudential motives might concur to deter a general from 
 proceeding to violent measures with such a person, especially 
 in a civil war, where the discipline of an armed party cannot 
 be conducted upon the same system as that of a regular army 
 serving in a foreign war. Monmouth's disappointment in 
 lord Grey was aggravated by the loss of Fletcher of Saltoun, 
 who, in a sort of scufEe that ensued, upon his being reproached 
 for having seized a horse belonging to a man of the country, 
 had the misfortune to kill the owner. Monmouth, however 
 unwilling, thought himself obliged to dismiss him; and thus, 
 while a fatal concurrence of circumstances forced him to 
 part with the man he esteemed, and to retain him whom he 
 despised, he found himself at once disappointed of the support 
 of the two persons upon whom he had most relied. 
 
 On the loth of June, his army being now increased to 
 near three thousand men, the duke marched from Lyme. 
 He does not appear to have taken this step with a view to 
 any enterprise of importance, but rather to avoid the danger 
 
1685.] RECEPTION AT TAUNTON. 417 
 
 which he apprehended from the motions of the Devonshire 
 and Somerset militias, whose object it seemed to be to shut him 
 up in Lyme. In his first day's march, he had opportunities 
 of engaging, or rather of pursuing, each of those bodies, who 
 severally retreated from his forces; but conceiving it to be 
 his business, as he said, not to fight, but to march on, he went 
 through Axminster, and encamped in a strong piece of ground 
 between that town and Chard in Somersetshire, to which 
 place he proceeded on the ensuing day. According to Wade's 
 narrative, which appears to afford by far the most authentic 
 account of these transactions, here it was that the first pro- 
 position was made for proclaiming Monmouth king. Fer- 
 guson made the proposal, and was supported by lord Grey, 
 but it was easily run doivn, as Wade expresses it, by those 
 who were against it, and whom, therefore, we must suppose 
 to have formed a very considerable majority of the persons 
 deemed of sufficient importance to be consulted on such an 
 occasion. These circumstances are material, because if that 
 credit be given to them which they appear to deserve, Fer- 
 guson's want of veracity becomes so notorious, that it is 
 hardly worth while to attend to any part of his narrative. 
 Where it only corroborates accounts given by others, it is of 
 little use; and where it differs from them, it deserves no 
 credit. I have, therefore, wholly disregarded it. 
 
 From Chard, Monmouth and his party proceeded to 
 Taunton, a town where, as well for the tenour of former 
 occurrences, as from the zeal and number of the protestant 
 dissenters, who formed a great portion of its inhabitants, he 
 had every reason to expect the most favourable reception. 
 His expectations were not disappointed. The inhabitants 
 of the upper, as well as the lower classes, vied with each 
 other in testifying their affection for his person, and their 
 zeal for his cause. While the latter rent the air with ap- 
 plauses and acclamations, the former opened their houses to 
 him and to his followers, and furnished his army with neces- 
 saries and supplies of every kind. His way was strewed 
 with flowers; the windows were thronged with spectators, all 
 anxious to participate in what the warm feelings of the mo- 
 ment made them deem a triumph. Husbands pointed out to 
 their wives, mothers to their children, the brave and lovely 
 hero, who was destined to be the deliverer of his country. 
 
 E E 
 
418 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 The beautiful lines which Dryden makes Achitophel, in his 
 highest strain of flattery, apply to this unfortunate nobleman, 
 were in this instance literally verified: 
 
 " Thee, Saviour, thee, the nation's vows confess, 
 And, never satisfied with seeing, bless. 
 Swift unbespoken pomps thy steps proclaim, 
 And stammering babes are taught to lisp thy name." 
 
 In the midst of these joyous scenes, twenty-six young 
 maids, of the best families in the town, presented him, in the 
 name of their townsmen, with colours wrought by them for 
 the purpose, and with a Bible; upon receiving which, he 
 said that he had taken the field with a design to defend the 
 truth contained in that book, and to seal it with his blood if 
 there w^as occasion. 
 
 In such circumstances it is no wonder that his army in- 
 creased; and indeed, exclusive of individual recruits, he was 
 here strengthened by the arrival of colonel Bassett with a 
 considerable corps. But in the midst of these prosperous 
 circumstances, some of them of such apparent importance to 
 the success of his enterprise, all of them highly nattering to 
 his feelings, he did not fail to observe that one favourable 
 symptom (and that too of the most decisive nature) was 
 still wanting. None of the considerable families, not a 
 single nobleman, and scarcely any gentleman of rank and 
 consequence in the counties through which he had passed had 
 declared in his favour. Popular applause is undoubtedly 
 sweet; and not only so, it often furnishes most powerful 
 means to the genius that knows how to make use of them. 
 But jMonmouth well knew that- without the countenance and 
 assistance of a proportion, at least, of the higher ranks in the 
 country, there was, for an undertaking like his, little prospect 
 of success. He could not but have remarked that the habits 
 and prejudices of the English people are, in a great degree, 
 aristocratical; nor had he before him, nor indeed have we, 
 since his time, had one single example of an insurrection 
 that was successful, unaided by the ancient families and great 
 landed proprietors. He must have felt this the more, because, 
 in former parts of his political life, he had been accustomed to 
 act with such coadjutors; and it is highly probable that if lord 
 Eussell had been alive, and could have appeared at the head 
 
1685.] DECLARES HIMSELF KING. 419 
 
 of one hundred only of his western tenantry, such a reinforce- 
 ment would have inspired him with more real confidence 
 than the thousands who individually flocked to his standard. 
 
 But though Russell was no more, there were not wanting, 
 either in the provinces through which the duke passed, or in 
 other parts of the kingdom, many noble and wealthy fami- 
 lies, who were attached to the principles of the whigs. To 
 account for their neutrality, and, if possible, to persuade them 
 to a different conduct, was naturally among his principal 
 concerns. Their present coldness might be imputed to the 
 indistinctness of his declarations with respect to what was 
 intended to be the future government. Men zealous for 
 monarchy might not choose to embark without some certain 
 pledge that their favourite form should be preserved. They 
 would also expect to be satisfied with respect to the person 
 whom their arms, if successful, were to place upon the throne. 
 To promise, therefore, the continuance of a monarchical esta- 
 blishment, and to designate the future monarch, seemed to be 
 necessary for the purpose of acquiring aristocratical support. 
 Whatever might be the intrinsic weight of this argument, it 
 easily made its way with Monmouth in his present situation. 
 The aspiring temper of mind which is the natural conse- 
 quence of popular favour and success, produced in him a dis- 
 position to listen to any suggestion which tended to his 
 elevation and aggrandizement; and when he could persuade 
 himself, upon reasons specious at least, that the measures 
 which would most gratify his aspiring desires would be, at 
 the same time, a stroke of the soundest policy, it is not to be 
 wondered at, that it was immediately and impatiently adopted. 
 Urged, therefore, by these mixed motives, he declared himself 
 king, and issued divers proclamations in the royal style; 
 assigning to tho.se whose approbation he doubted, the rea- 
 sons above adverted to, and proscribing, and threatening 
 with the punishment due to rebellion, such as should resist 
 his mandates, and adhere to the usurping duke of York. 
 
 If this measure was in reality taken with views of policy, 
 those views were miserably disappointed; for it does not 
 appear that one proselyte was gained. The threats in the 
 proclamation were received with derision by the king's army, 
 and no other sentiments were excited by the assumption of 
 the royal title, than those of contempt and indignation. The 
 
 e e 2 
 
420 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 coram on wealtlismen were dissatisfied, of course, with the 
 principle of the measure: the favourers of hereditary right 
 held it in abhorrence, and considered it as a kind of sacri- 
 legious profanation; nor even among those who considered 
 monarchy in a more rational light, and as a magistracy insti- 
 tuted for the good of the people, could it be at all agreeable 
 that such a magistrate should be elected by the army that 
 had thronged to his standard, or by the particular partiality 
 of a provincial town. Monmouth's strength, therefore, was 
 by no means increased by his new title, and seemed to be 
 still limited to two descriptions of persons; first, those who, 
 from thoughtlessness or desperation, were willing to join in 
 any attempt at innovation; secondly, such as, directing their 
 views to a single point, considered the destruction of James's 
 tyranny as the object which, at all hazards, and without 
 regard to consequences, they were bound to pursue. On the 
 other hand, his reputation both for moderation and good 
 faith was considerably impaired, inasmuch as his present 
 conduct was in direct contradiction to that part of his decla- 
 ration wherein he had promised to leave the future adjust- 
 ment of government, and especially the consideration of his 
 own claims, to a free and independent parliament. 
 
 The notion of improving his new levies by discipline, 
 seems to have taken such possession of Monmouth's mind, 
 that he overlooked the probable, or rather the certain, conse- 
 quences of a delay, by which the enemy would be ena- 
 bled to bring into the field forces far better disciplined 
 and appointed than any which, even with the most strenuous 
 and successful exertions, he could hope to oppose to them. 
 Upon this principle, and especially as he had not yet fixed 
 upon any definite object of enterprise, he did not think a 
 stay of a few days at Taunton would be materially, if at all, 
 prejudicial to his affairs; and it was not till the 21st of June 
 that he proceeded to Bridgewater, where he was received in 
 the most cordial manner. In his march, the following day, 
 from that town to Glastonbury, he was alarmed by a party of 
 the earl of Oxford's horse; but all apprehensions of any 
 material interruptions were removed by an account of the 
 militia having left Wells, and retreated to Bath and Bristol. 
 From Glastonbury he went to Shipton-Mallet, where the 
 project of an attack upon Bristol was first communicated by 
 
1685.] DESIGN TO ATTACK BRISTOL. 421 
 
 the duke to his officers. After some discussion, it was agreed 
 that the attack should be made on the Gloucestershire side 
 of the city, and with that view to pass the Avon at Keyn- 
 sham Bridge, a few miles from Bath. In their march from 
 Shipton- Mallet, the troops were again harassed in their rear 
 by a party of horse and dragoons, but lodged quietly at night 
 at a village called Pensford. A detachment was sent early 
 the next morning to possess itself of Keynsham, and to repair 
 the bridge, which might probably be broken down, to pre- 
 vent a passage. Upon their approach, a troop of the Glou- 
 cestershire horse-militia immediately abandoned the town in 
 great precipitation, leaving behind them two horses and one 
 man. By break of day, the bridge, which had not been much 
 injured, was repaired, and before noon, Monmouth, having 
 passed it with his whole army, was in full march to Bristol, 
 which he determined to attack the ensuing night. But the 
 weather proving rainy and bad, it was deemed expedient to 
 return to Keynsham, a measure from which he expected to 
 reap a double advantage; to procure dry and commodious 
 quarters for the soldiery, and to lull the enemy, by a move- 
 ment which bore the semblance of a retreat, into a false and 
 delusive security. The event, however, did not answer his 
 expectation, for the troops had scarcely taken up their quarters, 
 when they were disturbed by two parties of horse, who 
 entered the town at two several places. An engagement 
 ensued, in which Monmouth lost fourteen men, and a cap- 
 tain of horse, though in the end the royalists were obliged to 
 retire, leaving three prisoners. From these the duke had 
 information that the king's army was near at hand, and, as 
 they said, about four thousand strong. 
 
 This new state of affairs seemed to demand new councils. 
 The projected enterprise upon Bristol was laid aside,, and 
 the question was, whether to make by forced marches for 
 Gloucester, in order to pass the Severn at that city, and so to 
 gain the counties of Salop and Chester, where he expected 
 to be met by many friends, or to march directly into Wilt- 
 shire, where, according to some intelligence received 1 [" from 
 
 1 Eeference is made to Adlam's intelligence, page 423. It is clear, 
 therefore, that Mr. Fox had intended to name him, hut as he omitted to do 
 so, the words between the inverted commas have been inserted by the 
 editor. 
 
422 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 one Adlam"] the day before, there was a considerable body 
 of horse, (under whose command does not appear,) ready, by 
 their junction, to afford him a most important and seasonable 
 support. To the first of these plans a decisive objection was 
 stated. The distance by Gloucester was so great, that, con- 
 sidering the slow marches to which he would be limited, by 
 the daily attacks with which the different small bodies of the 
 enemy's cavalry would not fail to harass his rear, he was in 
 great danger of being overtaken by the king's forces, and might 
 thus be driven to risk all in an engagement upon terms the most 
 disadvantageous. On the contrary, if joined in Wiltshire by 
 the expected aids, he might confidently offer battle to the 
 royal army; and, provided he could bring them to an action 
 before they were strengthened by new reinforcements, there 
 was no unreasonable prospect of success. The latter plan 
 was therefore adopted, and no sooner adopted than put in 
 execution. The army was in motion without delay, and 
 being before Bath on the morning of the 26th of June, sum- 
 moned the place, rather (as it should seem) in sport than in 
 earnest, as there was no hope of its surrender. After this 
 bravado they marched on southward to Philip's- Norton, 
 where they rested; the horse in the town, and the foot in 
 the field. 
 
 While Monmouth was making these marches, there were 
 not wanting, in many parts of the adjacent country, strong 
 symptoms of the attachment of the lower orders of people to 
 his cause, and more especially in those manufacturing towns 
 where the protestant dissenters were numerous. In Froome, 
 there had been a considerable rising, headed by the constable, 
 who posted up the duke's declaration in the market-place. 
 Many of the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns of West- 
 bury and Warminster came in throngs to the town to join 
 the insurgents; some armed with fire-arms, but more with 
 such rustic weapons as opportunity could supply. Such a 
 force, if it had joined the main army, or could have been 
 otherwise directed by any leader of judgment and authority, 
 might have proved very serviceable; but in its present state 
 it was a mere rabble, and upon the first appearance of the 
 earl of Pembroke, who entered the town with a hundred and 
 sixty horse, and forty musketeers, fell, as might be expected, 
 into total confusion. The rout was complete; all the arms 
 
1685.] monmouth's disappointment. 423 
 
 of the insurgents were seized; and the constable, after having 
 been compelled to abjure his principles, and confess the 
 enormity of his offence, was committed to prison. 
 
 This transaction took place the 25th, the day before Mon- 
 mouth's arrival at Philip's -Norton, and may have, in a consider- 
 able degree, contributed to the disappointment, of which we 
 learn from Wade, that he at this time began bitterly to 
 complain. He was now upon the confines of Wiltshire, and 
 near enough for the bodies of horse, upon whose favourable 
 intentions so much reliance had been placed, to have effected 
 a junction, if they had been so disposed; but whether that 
 Adlam's intelligence had been originally bad, or that Pem- 
 broke's proceedings at Froome had intimidated them, no 
 symptom of such an intention could be discovered. A de- 
 sertion took place in his army, which the exaggerated accounts 
 in the gazette made to amount to near two thousand men. 
 These dispiriting circumstances, added to the complete dis- 
 appointment of the hopes entertained from the assumption of 
 the royal title, produced in him a state of mind but little 
 short of despondency. He complained that all people had 
 deserted him, and is said to have been so dejected, as hardly 
 to have the spirit requisite for giving the necessary orders. 
 
 From this state of torpor, however, he appears to have 
 been effectually roused by a brisk attack that was made upon 
 him on the 27th, in the morning, by the royalists, under the 
 command of his half-brother, the duke of Grafton. That 
 spirited young nobleman, (whose intrepid courage, conspi- 
 cuous upon every occasion, led him in this, and many other 
 instances, to risk a life, which he finally lost 1 in a better 
 cause,) heading an advanced detachment of Lord Feversham's 
 army, who had marched from Bath ? with a view to fall on 
 the enemy's rear, marched boldly up a narrow lane leading to 
 the town, and attacked a barricade, which Monmouth had 
 caused to be made across the way, at the entrance of the 
 
 1 At the siege of Cork, in 1690. " In this action" (the taking of Cork 
 by storm) " the duke of Grafton received a shot, of which he died in a few 
 days. He was the more lamented, as being the person of all king Charles's 
 children of whom there was the greatest hope ; he was brave, and pro- 
 bably would have become a great man at sea." Burnet, iii. 83. He distin- 
 guished himself particularly in the action off Beachy-head that same year. 
 Sir J. Dalrymple, ii. 131. — Ed. 
 
424 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 town. Monmouth was no sooner apprised of this brisk attack, 
 than he ordered a party to go out of the town by a by-way, 
 who coming on the rear of the grenadiers while others of his 
 men were engaged with their front, had nearly surrounded 
 them, and taken their commander prisoner, but Grafton 
 forced his way through the enemy. An engagement ensued 
 between the insurgents and the remainder of Feversham's 
 detachment, who had lined the hedges which flanked them. 
 The former were victorious, and after driving the enemy 
 from hedge to hedge, forced them at last into the open field, 
 Where they joined the rest of the king's forces, newly come 
 up. The killed and wounded in these rencounters amounted 
 to about forty on Feversham's side, twenty on Monmouth's; 
 but among the latter there were several officers, and some of 
 note, while the loss of the former, with the exception of two 
 volunteers, Seymour and May, consisted entirely of common 
 soldiers. 
 
 The royalists now drew up on an eminence, about five 
 hundred paces from the hedges, while Monmouth, having placed 
 of his four field-pieces, two at the mouth of the lane, and two 
 upon a rising ground near it on the right, formed his army 
 along the hedge. From these stations, a firing of artillery 
 Was begun on each side, and continued near six hours, but 
 with little or no effect. Monmouth, according to Wade, 
 losing but one, and the royalists, according to the Gazette, 
 not one man, by the whole cannonade. In these circum- 
 stances, notwithstanding the recent and convincing experience 
 he now had of the ability of his raw troops to face, in certain 
 situations at least, the more regular forces of his enemy, 
 Monmouth was advised by some to retreat; but upon a more 
 general consultation, this advice was over-ruled, and it was 
 determined to cut passages through the hedges and to offer 
 battle. But before this could be effected, the royal army, 
 not willing again to engage among the enclosures, annoyed in 
 the open field by the rain which continued to fall very heavily, 
 and disappointed, no doubt, at the little effect of their artillery, 
 began their retreat. The little confidence which Monmouth 
 had in his horse — perhaps the ill opinion he now entertained 
 of their leader — forbade him to think of pursuit, and having 
 stayed till a late hour in the field, and leaving large fires burn- 
 ing, he set out on his march in the night, and on the 28th, 
 
1685.] DESPONDENCY OF MONMOUTH. 425 
 
 in the morning, reached Froorne, where he put his troops in 
 quarter and rested two days. 
 
 It was here he first heard certain news of Argyle's discom- 
 fiture. It was in vain to seek for any circumstance in his 
 affairs that might mitigate the effect of the severe blow 
 inflicted by this intelligence, and he relapsed into the same 
 low spirits as at Philip's -Norton. No diversion, at least no 
 successful diversion, had been made in his favour: there was 
 no appearance of the horse, which had been the principal 
 motive to allure him into that part of the country; and what 
 was worst of all, no desertion from the king's army. It was 
 manifest, said the duke's more timid advisers, that the affair 
 must terminate ill, and the only measure now to be taken was, 
 that the general with his officers should leave the army to 
 shift for itself, and make severally for the most convenient 
 sea-ports, whence they might possibly get a safe passage to 
 the Continent. To account for Monmouth's entertaining, 
 even for a moment, a thought so unworthy of him, and so 
 inconsistent with the character for spirit he had ever main- 
 tained — a character unimpeached even by his enemies — we 
 must recollect the unwillingness with which he undertook 
 this fatal expedition; that his engagement to Argyle, who 
 was now past help, was perhaps his principal motive for em- 
 barking at the time; that it was with great reluctance he had 
 torn himself from the arms of Lady Harriet Wentworth, with 
 whom he had so firmly persuaded himself that he could be 
 happy in the most obscure retirement, that he believed him- 
 self w^eaned from ambition, which had hitherto been the only 
 passion of his mind. It is true, that when he had once yielded 
 to the solicitations of his friends so far as to undertake a 
 business of such magnitude, it was his duty (but a duty that 
 required a stronger mind than his to execute) to discard 
 from his thoughts all the arguments that had rendered his 
 compliance reluctant. But it is one of the great distinctions 
 between an ordinary mind and a superior one, to be able to 
 carry on without relenting a plan we have not originally 
 approved, and especially when it appears to have turned out 
 ill. This proposal of disbanding was a step so pusillanimous 
 and dishonourable, that it could not be approved by any 
 council, however composed. It was condemned by all except 
 colonel Venner, and was particularly inveighed against by 
 
426 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 lord Grey, wlio was perhaps desirous of retrieving, by bold 
 words at least, the reputation he had lost at Bridport. It is 
 possible, too, that he might be really unconscious of his 
 deficiency in point of personal courage till the moment of 
 danger arrived, and even forgetful of it when it was passed. 
 Monmouth was easily persuaded to give up a plan so uncon- 
 genial to his nature, resolved, though with little hope of 
 success, to remain with his army to take the chance of events, 
 and at the worst to stand or fall with men whose attachment 
 to him had laid him under indelible obligations. 
 
 This resolution being taken, the first plan was to proceed 
 to Warminster, but on the morning of his departure hearing, 
 on the one hand, that the king's troops were likely to cross 
 his march, and on the other, being informed by a quaker 
 before known to the duke, that there was a great club army, 
 amounting to ten thousand men, ready to join his standard 
 in the marshes to the westward, he altered his intention, and 
 returned to Shipton -Mallet, where he rested that night, his 
 army being in good quarters. From Shipton-Mallet he pro- 
 ceeded, on the first of July, to Wells, upon information that 
 there were in that city some carriages belonging to the king's 
 army, and ill guarded. These he found and took, and stayed 
 that night in the town. The following day he marched to- 
 wards Bridgewater, in search of the great succour he had been 
 taught to expect ; but found, of the promised ten thousand 
 men, only a hundred and sixty. The army lay that night in 
 the field, and once again entered Bridgewater on the third of 
 July. That the duke's men were not yet completely dispirited 
 or out of heart, appears from the circumstance of great num- 
 bers of them going from Bridgewater to see their friends at 
 Taunton, and other places in the neighbourhood, and almost 
 all returning the next day according to their promise. On 
 the fifth, an account was received of the king's army being 
 considerably advanced, and Monmouth's first thought was to 
 retreat from it immediately, and marching by Axbridge and 
 Keynsham to Gloucester, to pursue the plan formerly rejected, 
 of penetrating into the counties of Chester and Salop. 
 
 His preparations for this march were all made, when, on 
 the afternoon of the fifth, he learnt, more accurately than he 
 had before done, the true situation of the royal army, and 
 from the information now received, he thought it expedient 
 
1685.] BATTLE OF SEDGMOOR. 427 
 
 to consult his principal officers whether it might not be ad- 
 visable to attempt to surprise the enemy by a night attack 
 upon their quarters. The prevailing opinion was, that if the 
 infantry were not intrenched the plan was worth the trial; 
 otherwise not. Scouts were despatched to ascertain this 
 point, and their report being that there was no intrenchment, 
 an attack was resolved on. In pursuance of this resolution, 
 at about eleven at night, the whole army was in march, lord 
 Grey commanding the horse, and colonel Wade the vanguard 
 of the foot. The duke's orders were, that the horse should 
 first advance, and pushing into the enemy's camp, endeavour 
 to prevent their infantry from coming together; that the can- 
 non should follow the horse, and the foot the cannon, and 
 draw all up in one line, and so finish what the cavalry should 
 have begun, before the king's horse and artillery could be got 
 in order. But it was now discovered that though there were 
 no intrenchments, there was a ditch which served as a drain 
 to the great moor adjacent, of which no mention had been 
 made by the scouts. To this ditch the horse under lord Grey 
 advanced, and no farther; and whether immediately, as ac- 
 cording to some accounts, or after having been considerably 
 harassed by the enemy in their attempts to find a place to 
 pass, according to others, quitted the field. The cavalry 
 being gone, and the principle upon which the attack had been 
 undertaken being that of a surprise, the duke judged it neces- 
 sary that the infantry should advance as speedily as possible. 
 Wade, therefore, when he came within forty paces of the 
 ditch, was obliged to halt to put his battalion into that order, 
 which the extreme rapidity of the march had for the time 
 disconcerted. His plan was to pass the ditch, reserving his 
 fire; but while he was arranging his men for that purpose, 
 another battalion, newly come up, began to fire, though at a 
 considerable distance; a bad example, which it was impossible 
 to prevent the vanguard from following, and it was now no 
 longer in the power of their commander to persuade them to 
 advance. The king's forces, as well horse and artillery as 
 foot, had now full time to assemble. The duke had no longer 
 cavalry in the field, and though his artillery, which consisted 
 only of three or four iron guns, was well served under the 
 directions of a Dutch gunner, it was by no means equal to 
 that of the royal army, which, as soon as it was light, began 
 
428 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 to do great execution. In these circumstances the unfortu- 
 nate Monmouth, fearful of being encompassed and made 
 prisoner by the king's cavalry, who were approaching upon 
 his flank, and urged, as it is reported, to flight by the same 
 person who had stimulated him to his fatal enterprise, quitted 
 the field, accompanied by lord Grey and some others. The 
 left wing, under the command of colonel Holmes and Matthews, 
 next gave way; and Wade's men, after having continued for 
 an hour and a half, a distant and ineffectual fire, seeing their 
 left discomfited, began a retreat, which soon afterwards 
 became a complete rout. 
 
 Thus ended the decisive battle of Sedgmoor; an attack 
 which seems to have been judiciously conceived, and in many 
 parts spiritedly executed. The general was deficient neither 
 in courage nor conduct; and the troops, while they displayed 
 the native bravery of Englishmen, were under as good dis- 
 cipline as could be expected from bodies newly raised. Two 
 circumstances seem to have principally contributed to the loss 
 of the day; first, the unforeseen difficulty occasioned by the 
 ditch, of which the assailants had had no intelligence; and 
 secondly, the cowardice of the commander of the horse. The 
 discovery of the ditch was the more alarming, because it 
 threw a general doubt upon the information of the spies, and 
 the night being dark they could not ascertain that this was 
 the only impediment of the kind which they were to expect. 
 The dispersion of the horse was still more fatal, inasmuch as 
 it deranged the whole order of the plan, by which it had been 
 concerted that their operations were to facilitate the attack to 
 be made by the foot. If lord Grey had possessed a spirit 
 more suitable to his birth and name, to the illustrious friend- 
 ship with which he had been honoured, and to the command 
 with which he was entrusted, he would doubtless have per- 
 severed till he found a passage into the enemy's camp, which 
 could have been effected at a ford not far distant: the loss of 
 time occasioned by the ditch might not have been very mate- 
 rial, and the most important consequences might have ensued; 
 but it would surely be rashness to assert, as Hume does, that 
 the army would after all have gained the victory, had not the 
 misconduct of Monmouth and the cowardice of Grey pre- 
 vented it. This rash judgment is the more to be admired, 
 as the historian has not pointed out the instance of miscon- 
 
1685.] monmouth's escape. 429 
 
 duct to wliicli lie refers. The number of Monmouth's men 
 killed is computed by some at two thousand, by others, at 
 three hundred; a disparity, however, which may be easily 
 reconciled, by supposing that the one account takes in those 
 who were killed in battle, while the other comprehends the 
 wretched fugitives who were massacred in ditches, corn- 
 fields, and other hiding places, the following day. 
 
 In general, I have thought it right to follow Wade's narra- 
 tive, which appears to me by far the most authentic, if not 
 the only authentic account of this important transaction. It 
 is imperfect, but its imperfection arises from the narrator's 
 omitting all those circumstances of which he was not an eye- 
 witness, and the greater credit is on that very account due to 
 him for those which he relates. With respect to Monmouth's 
 quitting the field, it is not mentioned by him, nor is it pos- 
 sible to ascertain the precise point of time at which it hap- 
 pened. That he fled while his troops were still fighting, and 
 therefore too soon for his glory, can scarcely be doubted; and 
 the account given by Ferguson, whose veracity, however, is 
 always to be suspected, that lord Grey urged him to the mea- 
 sure, as well by persuasion as by example, seems not improbable. 
 The misbehaviour of the last-mentioned nobleman is more 
 certain; but as, according to Ferguson, who has been followed 
 by others, he actually conversed with Monmouth in the field, 
 and as all accounts make him the companion of his flight, 
 it is not to be understood that w T hen he first gave way with 
 his cavalry, he ran away in the literal sense of the words, or 
 if he did, he must have returned. The exact truth, with 
 regard to this and many other interesting particulars, is diffi- 
 cult to be discovered; owing, not more to the darkness of 
 the night in which they were transacted, than to the per- 
 sonal partialities and enmities by wmich they have been 
 disfigured, in the relations of the different contemporary 
 writers. 
 
 Monmouth with his suite first directed his course towards 
 the Bristol Channel, and as is related by Oldmixon, was once 
 inclined, at the suggestion of Dr. Oliver, a faithful and honest 
 adviser, to embark for the coast of Wales, with a view of 
 concealing himself some time in that principality. Lord Grey, 
 who appears to have been, in all instances, his evil genius, 
 dissuaded him from this plan, and the small party having 
 
430 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 separated, took each several ways. Monmouth, Grey, and 
 a gentleman of Brandenburg, went southward, with a view to 
 gain the New Forest in Hampshire, where, by means of 
 Grey's connexions in that district, and thorough knowledge 
 of the country, it was hoped they might be in safety, till a 
 vessel could be procured to transport them to the Continent. 
 They left their horses, and disguised themselves as peasants; 
 but the pursuit, stimulated as well by party zeal, as by the 
 great pecuniary rewards offered for the capture of Monmouth 
 and Grey, was too vigilant to be eluded. Grey was taken 
 on the 7th in the evening; and the German, who shared the 
 same fate early on the next morning, confessed that he had 
 parted from Monmouth but a few hours since. The neigh- 
 bouring country was immediately and thoroughly searched, 
 and James had ere night the satisfaction of learning that his 
 nephew was in his power. The unfortunate duke was dis- 
 covered in a ditch, half concealed by fern and nettles. His 
 stock of provision, which consisted of some peas gathered in 
 the fields through which he had fled, was nearly exhausted, 
 and there is reason to think that he had little, if any other 
 sustenance, since he left Bridgewater on the evening of the 
 5th. To repose he had been equally a stranger; how his 
 mind must have been harassed, it is needless to discuss. Yet 
 that in such circumstances he appeared dispirited and crest- 
 fallen, is, by the unrelenting malignity of party writers, 
 imputed to him as cowardice and meanness of spirit. That 
 the failure of his enterprise, together with the bitter reflection, 
 that he had suffered himself to be engaged in it against his 
 own better judgment, joined to the other calamitous circum- 
 stances of his situation, had reduced him to a state of despon- 
 dency, is evident; and in this frame of mind, he wrote on the 
 very clay of his capture, the following letter to the king: 
 
 u Sir, — Your majesty may think it the misfortune I now 
 lie under, makes me make this application to you; but I do 
 assure your majesty, it is the remorse I now have in me of 
 the wrong I have done you in several things, and now in 
 taking up arms against you. For my taking up arms, it w r as 
 never in my thought since the king died: the prince and 
 princess of Orange will be witness for me of the assurance I 
 gave them, that I would never stir against you. But my 
 misfortune was such as to meet with some horrid people, that 
 
1685.] LETTER TO THE KING. 431 
 
 made me believe things of your majesty, and gave me so 
 many false arguments, that I was fully led away to believe, 
 that it was a shame and a sin before God not to do it. But, 
 sir, I will not trouble your majesty at present with many 
 things I could say for myself, that I am sure would move 
 your compassion; the chief end of this letter being only to 
 beg of you, that I may have that happiness as to speak to your 
 majesty; for I have that to say to you, sir, that I hope may 
 give you a long and happy reign. 
 
 " I am sure, sir, when you hear me, you will be convinced 
 of the zeal I have of your preservation, and how heartily I 
 repent of what I have done. I can say no more to your 
 majesty now, being this letter must be seen by those that 
 keep me. Therefore, sir, I shall make an end, in begging 
 of your majesty to believe so well of me, that I would rather 
 die a thousand deaths than excuse anything I have done, if I 
 did not really think myself the most in the wrong that ever 
 a man was, and had not from the bottom of my heart an 
 abhorrence for those that put me upon it, and for the action 
 itself. I hope, sir, God Almighty will strike your heart with 
 mercy and compassion for me, as he has done mine with the 
 abhorrence of what I have done: wherefore, sir, I hope I 
 may live to show you how zealous I shall ever be for your 
 service; and could I but say one word in this letter, you 
 would be convinced of it; but it is of that consequence, that I 
 dare not do it. Therefore, sir, I do beg of you once more to 
 let me speak to you ; for then you will be convinced how much 
 I shall ever be, your majesty's most humble and dutiful 
 
 " Monmouth." 
 
 The only certain conclusion to be drawn from this letter, 
 which Mr. Echard, in a manner perhaps not so seemly for a 
 churchman, terms submissive, 1 is, that Monmouth still wished 
 anxiously for life, and was willing to save it, even at the 
 cruel price of begging and receiving it as a boon from his 
 enemy. Ralph conjectures with great probability, that this 
 unhappy man's feelings were all governed by his excessive 
 affection for his mistress; and that a vain hope of enjoying, 
 with lady Harriet Wentworth, that retirement which he had 
 
 1 E chard, p. 771. "His former spiiit sunk into pusillanimity, and he 
 meanly endeavoured, by the following submissive letter," &c. — E. 
 
432 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 so unwillingly abandoned, induced him to adopt a conduct, 
 which he might otherwise have considered as indecent. At 
 any rate it must be admitted that to cling to life, is a strong 
 instinct in human nature, and Monmouth might reasonably 
 enough satisfy himself, that when his death could not by any 
 possibility benefit either the public or his friends, to follow 
 such instinct, even in a manner that might tarnish the splen- 
 dour of heroism, was no impeachment of the moral virtue of 
 a man. 
 
 With respect to the mysterious part of the letter, where he 
 speaks of one word which would be of such infinite import- 
 ance, it is difficult, if not rather utterly impossible, to ex- 
 plain it by any rational conjecture. Mr. Macpherson's 
 favourite hypothesis, that the prince of Orange had been a 
 party to the late attempt, and that Monmouth's intention, 
 when he wrote the letter, was to disclose this important fact 
 to the king, 1 is totally destroyed by those expressions, in 
 which the unfortunate prisoner tells his majesty he had 
 assured the prince and princess of Orange that he would 
 never stir against him. Did he assure the prince of Orange 
 that he would never do that which he was engaged to the 
 prince of Orange to do? Can it be said that this was a false 
 fact, and that no such assurances were in truth given? To 
 what purpose was the falsehood? In order to conceal, from 
 motives whether honourable or otherwise, his connexion with 
 the prince? What! a fiction in one paragraph of the letter 
 in order to conceal a fact, which in the next he declares his 
 intention of revealing? The thing is impossible. 2 
 
 The intriguing character of the secretary of state, the earl 
 of Sunderland, whose duplicity in many instances cannot be 
 doubted, and the mystery in which almost everything relating 
 to him is involved, might lead us to suspect that the expres- 
 sions point at some discovery in which that nobleman was 
 concerned, and that Monmouth had it in his power to be of 
 
 1 Macpherson's Hist. 
 2 Even if this complete refutation were wanting, the whole system of 
 conduct imputed to the prince of Orange by the above-mentioned author, 
 by which he is made to act in concert with Monmouth at this time, is so 
 contrary to common sense, that the hypothesis never could have been 
 offered to the belief of mankind by one whose mind was not fortified by 
 some previous experience of their unbounded credulity. 
 
1685.] OBSERVATIONS ON THE LETTER. 433 
 
 important service to James, by revealing to him the treachery 
 of his minister. Such a conjecture might be strengthened by 
 an anecdote that has had some currency, and to the truth of 
 which, in part, king James's Memoirs, if the extracts from 
 them can be relied on, bear testimony. It is said that the 
 duke of Monmouth told Mr. Ralph Sheldon, one of the king's 
 chamber, who came to meet him on his way to London, that 
 he had had reason to expect Sunderland's co-operation, and 
 authorized Sheldon to mention this to the king: that while 
 Sheldon was relating this to his majesty, Sunderland entered; 
 Sheldon hesitated, but was ordered to go on. " Sunderland 
 seemed, at first, struck," (as well he might, whether innocent 
 or guilty,) "but after a short time said, with a laugh, 'If 
 that be all he (Monmouth) can discover to save his life, it 
 will do him little good.' " x It is to be remarked, that in 
 Sheldon's conversation, as alluded to by king James, the 
 prince of Orange's name is not even mentioned, either as con- 
 nected with Monmouth or with Sunderland. But, on the 
 other hand, the difficulties that stand in the way of our inter- 
 preting Monmouth's letter as alluding to Sunderland, or of 
 supposing that the writer of it had any well-founded accusa- 
 tion against that minister, are insurmountable. If he had 
 such an accusation to make, why did he not make it? The 
 king says expressly, both in a letter to the prince of Orange, 
 and in the extract from his Memoirs, above cited, that Mon- 
 mouth made no discovery of consequence, and the explana- 
 tion suggested, that his silence was owing to Sunderland the 
 secretary's having assured him of his pardon, seems wholly 
 inadmissible. Such assurances could have their influence no 
 longer than while the hope of pardon remained. ^Vhy, then, 
 did he continue silent, when he found James inexorable? Jf 
 he was willing to accuse the earl before he had received these 
 assurances, it is inconceivable that he should have any scruple 
 about doing it when they turned out to have been delusive, 
 and when his mind must have been exasperated by the reflec- 
 tion that Sunderland's perfidious promises and self-interested 
 suggestions had deterred him from the only probable means 
 of saving his life. 
 
 A third, and perhaps the most plausible, interpretation of 
 
 1 Macplierson's State Papers, i. 14G. 
 
 F F 
 
434 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 the words in question is, that they point to a discovery of 
 Monmouth's friends in England, when, in the dejected state 
 of his mind at the time of writing, unmanned as he was by 
 misfortune, he might sincerely promise what the return of 
 better thoughts forbade him to perform. This account, how- 
 ever, though free from the great absurdities belonging to the 
 two others, is by no means satisfactory. The phrase, " one 
 word," seems to relate rather to some single person, or some 
 single fact, and can hardly apply to any list of associates that 
 might be intended to be sacrificed. On the other hand, the 
 single denunciation of lord Delamere, of Lord Brandon, or 
 even of the earl of Devonshire, or of any other private indi- 
 vidual, could not be considered as of that extreme consequence 
 which Monmouth attaches to his promised disclosure. I have 
 mentioned lord Devonshire, who was certainly not implicated 
 in the enterprise, and who was not even suspected, because it 
 appears, from Grey's narrative, that one of Monmouth's agents 
 had once given hopes of his support; and therefore there is a 
 bare possibility that Monmouth may have reckoned upon his 
 assistance. Perhaps, after all, the letter has been canvassed 
 with too much nicety, and the words of it weighed more 
 scrupulously than, proper allowance being made for the situa- 
 tion and state of mind of the writer, they ought to have been. 
 They may have been thrown out at hazard, merely as means 
 to obtain an interview, of which the unhappy prisoner thought 
 he might, in some way or other, make his advantage. If any 
 more precise meaning existed in his mind, we must be content 
 to pass it over as one of those obscure points of history, upon 
 which neither the sagacity of historians, nor the many docu- 
 ments since made public, nor the great discoverer, Time, has 
 yet thrown any distinct light. 
 
 Monmouth and Grey were now to be conveyed to London, 
 for which purpose they set out on the 11th, and arrived in the 
 vicinity of the metropolis on the 1 3th of July. In the mean- 
 while, the queen dowager, who seems to have behaved with a 
 uniformity of kindness towards her husband's son that does 
 her great honour, urgently pressed the king to admit his 
 nephew to an audience. Importuned, therefore, by entreaties, 
 and instigated by the curiosity which Monmouth's mysterious 
 expressions, and Sheldon's story had excited, he consented, 
 though with a fixed determination to show no mercy. James 
 
1685.] the king's INTERVIEW WITH MONMOUTH. 435 
 
 was not of the number of those, in whom the want of an 
 extensive understanding is compensated by a delicacy of sen- 
 timent, or by those right feelings, which are often found to be 
 better guides for the conduct than the most accurate reason- 
 ing. His nature did not revolt, his blood did not run cold, at 
 the thoughts of beholding the son of a brother whom he had 
 loved, embracing his knees, petitioning, and petitioning in 
 vain, for life; of interchanging words and looks with a nephew, 
 on whom he was inexorably determined, within forty-eight 
 short hours, to inflict an ignominious death. 
 
 In Macpherson's extract from king James's Memoirs, it is 
 confessed that the king ought not to have seen, if he was not 
 disposed to pardon the culprit; 1 but whether the observation 
 is made by the exiled prince himself, or by him who gives the 
 extract, is in this, as in many other passages of those Memoirs,, 
 difficult to determine. Surely if the king had made this re- 
 flection before Monmouth's execution, it must have occurred 
 to that monarch, that if he had inadvertently done that which 
 he ought not to have done, without an intention to pardon, 
 the only remedy was to correct that part of his conduct which 
 was still in his power, and since he could not recal the 
 interview, to grant the pardon. 
 
 Pursuant to this hard-hearted arrangement, Monmouth and 
 Grey, on the very day of their arrival, were brought to White- 
 hall, where they had severally interviews with his majesty. 
 James, in a letter to the prince of Orange, dated the following 
 day, gives a short account of both these interviews. Mon- 
 mouth, he says, betrayed a weakness which did not become 
 one who had claimed the title of king; but made no discovery 
 of consequence. Grey was more ingenuous, 2 (it is not cer- 
 tain in what sense his majesty uses the term, since he does not 
 refer to any discovery made by that lord,) and never once 
 begged his life. Short as this account is, it seems the only 
 authentic one of those interviews. Bishop Kennet, who has 
 been followed by most of the modern historians, relates, that 
 " This unhappy captive, by the intercession of the queen 
 dowager, was brought to the king's presence, and fell presently 
 at his feet, and 'confessed he deserved to die; but conjured 
 him, with tears in his eyes, not to use him with the severity of 
 justice, and to grant him a life, which he would be ever ready 
 
 1 Macpherson's State Papers, i. 144. 2 Dalrvmple's Memoirs, ii. 134. 
 
 ' F F 2 
 
436 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES IT. [1685. 
 
 to sacrifice for his service. He mentioned to liim the example 
 of several great princes, who had yielded to the impressions 
 of clemency on the like occasions, and who had never after- 
 wards repented of those acts of generosity and mercy; con- 
 cluding in a most pathetical manner, ' Remember, sir, I am 
 your brother's son, and if you take my life, it is your own 
 blood that you will shed.' The king asked him several ques- 
 tions, and made him sign a declaration that his father told him 
 he was never married to his mother : and then said, he was 
 sorry indeed for his misfortunes; but his crime was of too 
 great a consequence to be left unpunished, and he must of ne- 
 cessity sailer for it. The queen is said to have insulted him 
 in a very arrogant and unmerciful manner. So that when the 
 duke saw there was nothing designed by this interview but to 
 satisfy the queen's revenge, he rose up from his majesty's feet 
 with a new air of bravery, and was carried back to the 
 Tower." 1 
 
 The topics used by Monmouth are such as he might 
 naturally have employed, and the demeanour attributed to 
 him, upon finding the king inexorable, is consistent enough 
 with general probability, and his particular character: but 
 that the king took care to extract from him a confession of 
 Charles's declaration with respect to his illegitimacy, before 
 he announced his final refusal of mercy, and that the queen 
 was present for the purpose of reviling and insulting him, are 
 circumstances too atrocious to merit belief, without some 
 more certain evidence. It must be remarked also, that Bur- 
 net, whose general prejudices would not lead him to doubt 
 any imputations against the queen, does not mention her 
 majesty's being present. Monmouth's offer of changing 
 religion is mentioned by him, but no authority quoted; and 
 no hint of the kind appears either in James's Letters, or in 
 the extract from his Memoirs. 
 
 From "Whitehall, Monmouth was at night carried to the 
 Tower, where, no longer uncertain as to his fate, he seems to 
 have collected his mind, and to have resumed his wonted 
 fortitude. The bill of attainder that had lately passed having 
 superseded the necessity of a legal trial, his execution was 
 fixed for the next day but one after his commitment. This 
 
 i Kennet, iii. 432. Ecliard, iii. 771. 
 
168o.] monmouth's execution fixed. 437 
 
 interval appeared too short even for the worldly business 
 which he wished to transact, and he wrote again to the king 
 on the 14th, desiring some short respite, vv T hich was peremp- 
 torily refused. The difficulty of obtaining any certainty 
 concerning facts 5 even in instances where there has not been 
 any apparent motive for disguising them, is nowhere more 
 striking than in the few remaining hours of this unfortunate 
 man's life. According to king James's statement in his 
 Memoirs, he refused to see his wife, while other accounts 
 assert positively that she refused to see him, unless in presence 
 of witnesses. Burnet, who was not likely to be mistaken in 
 a fact of this kind, says they did meet, and parted very 
 coldly, a circumstance, which, if true, gives us no very favour- 
 able idea of the lady's character. There is also mention of a 
 third letter written by him to the king, which being entrusted 
 to a perfidious officer of the name of Scott, never reached its 
 destination; 1 but for this there is no foundation. What 
 seems most certain is, that in the Tower, and not in the 
 closet, he signed a paper, renouncing his pretensions to the 
 crown, the same which he afterwards delivered on the scaffold; 
 and that he was inclined to make this declaration, not by any 
 vain hope of life, but by his affection for his children, whose 
 situation he rightly judged would be safer and better under 
 the reigning monarch and his successors, when it should be 
 evident that they could no longer be competitors for the throne, 
 Monmouth was very sincere in his religious professions, 
 and it is probable that a great portion of this sad day was 
 passed in devotion and religious discourse with the two pre- 
 lates who had been sent by his majesty to assist him in his 
 spiritual concerns. Turner, bishop of Ely, had been with 
 him early in the morning, and Kenn, bishop of Bath and 
 "Wells, was sent, upon the refusal of a respite, to prepare 
 him for the stroke, which it was now irrevocably fixed he 
 should suffer the ensuing day. They stayed with him all 
 night, and in the morning of the fifteenth were joined by Dr, 
 Hooper, afterwards, in the reign of Anne, made bishop of 
 Bath and Wells, and by Dr. Tennison, who succeeded Tillot- 
 son in the see of Canterbury. This last divine is stated by 
 Burnet to have been most acceptable to the duke, and, though 
 
 1 Dalrymple's Memoirs, i. 127. 
 
438 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 he joined the others in some harsh expostulations, to have 
 done what the right reverend historian conceives to have 
 been his duty, in a softer and less peremptory manner. Cer- 
 tain it is, that none of these holy men seem to have erred on 
 the side of compassion or complaisance to their illustrious 
 penitent. Besides endeavouring to convince him of the guilt 
 of his connexion with his beloved lady Harriet, of which he 
 could never be brought to a due sense, they seem to have 
 repeatedly teased him with controversy, and to have been far 
 more solicitous to make him profess what they deemed the 
 true creed of the church of England, than to soften or console 
 his sorrows, or to help him to that composure of mind so 
 necessary for his situation. He declared himself to be a 
 member of their church, but they denied that he could be so, 
 unless he thoroughly believed the doctrine of passive obedi- 
 ence and non-resistance. He repented generally of his sins, 
 and especially of his late enterprise, but they insisted that he 
 must repent of it in the w 7 ay they prescribed to him, that he 
 must own it to have been a wicked resistance to his lawful 
 king, and a detestable act of rebellion. 1 Some historians 
 have imputed this seemingly cruel conduct to the king's par- 
 ticular instructions, who might be desirous of extracting, or 
 rather extorting, from the lips of his dying nephew such a 
 confession as would be matter of triumph to the royal cause. 
 But the character of the two prelates principally concerned, 
 both for general uprightness and sincerity as church of Eng- 
 land men, makes it more candid to suppose that they did not 
 act from motives of servile compliance, but rather from an 
 intemperate party zeal for the honour of their church, which 
 they judged would be signally promoted if such a man as 
 Monmouth, after having throughout his life acted in defiance 
 of their favourite doctrine, could be brought in his last mo- 
 ments to acknowledge it as a divine truth. It must never be 
 forgotten, if we would understand the history of this period, 
 that the truly orthodox members of our church regarded 
 monarchy not as a human, but as a divine institution, and 
 passive obedience and non-resistance, not as political maxims, 
 but as articles of religion. 
 
 At ten o'clock on the 15th, Monmouth proceeded in a 
 
 1 Burnet, ii. 330. Ecliard, iii. 772. 
 
1685.] CIRCUMSTANCES OF MONMOUTH'S EXECUTION. 439 
 
 carriage of the lieutenant of the Tower to Tower-hill, the 
 place destined for his execution. The two bishops were in 
 the carriage with him, and one of them took that opportunity 
 of informing him, that their controversial altercations were 
 not yet at an end; and that upon the scaffold he would again 
 be pressed for more explicit and satisfactory declarations of 
 repentance. When arrived at the bar, which had been put 
 up for the purpose of keeping out the multitude, Monmouth 
 descended from the carriage, and mounted the scaffold, with 
 a firm step, attended by his spiritual assistants. The sheriffs 
 and executioners were already there. The concourse of 
 spectators was innumerable; and if we are to credit traditional 
 accounts, never was the general compassion more affectingly 
 expressed. The tears, sighs, and groans which the first 
 sight of this heart-rending spectacle produced, were soon suc- 
 ceeded by an universal and awful silence; a respectful atten- 
 tion, and affectionate anxiety, to hear every syllable that 
 should pass the lips of the sufferer. The duke began by say- 
 ng he should speak little; he came to die, and he should die 
 a protestant of the church of England. Here he was inter- 
 rupted by the assistants, and told, that if he was of the church 
 of England, he must acknowledge the doctrine of non-resist- 
 ance to be true. In vain did he reply that if he acknowledged 
 the doctrine of the church in general, it included all: they 
 insisted he should own that doctrine particularly w^ith respect 
 to his case, and urged much more concerning their favourite 
 point, upon w^hich, however, they obtained nothing but a 
 repetition in substance of former answers. He was then pro- 
 ceeding to speak of Lady Harriet TTentworth, of his high 
 esteem for her, and of his confirmed opinion that their con- 
 nexion was innocent in the sight of God; when Goslin, the 
 sheriff, asked him, with all the unfeeling bluntness of a vulgar 
 mind, whether he was ever married to her. The duke 
 refusing to answer, the same magistrate, in the like strain, 
 though changing his subject, said he hoped to have heard 
 of his repentance for the treason and bloodshed which had 
 been committed; to which the prisoner replied with great 
 mildness, that he died very penitent. Here the churchmen 
 again interposed, and renewing their demand of particular 
 penitence and public acknowledgment upon public affairs, 
 Monmouth referred them to the following paper, which he 
 had signed that morning: 
 
440 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 " I declare that the title of king was forced upon me, and 
 that it was very much contrary to my opinion when I was 
 proclaimed. For the satisfaction of the world, I do declare 
 that the Jate kins; told me he was never married to mv mother. 
 Having declared this, I hope the king who is now will not 
 let my children suffer on this account. And to this I put my 
 hand this fifteenth day of July, 1685. 
 
 " Monmouth." 
 
 There was nothing, they said, in that paper about resist- 
 ance; nor, though Monmouth, quite worn out with their 
 importunities, said to one of them, in the most affecting 
 manner, " I am to die — pray my Lord — I refer to my paper," 
 would those men think it consistent with their duty to desist. 
 There were only a few words they desired on one point. The 
 substance of these applications on the one hand, and answers 
 on the other, was repeated, over and over again, in a manner 
 that could not be believed, if the facts were not attested by 
 the signature of the persons principally concerned. 1 If the 
 duke, in declaring his sorrow for what had passed, used the 
 word invasion, " Give it the true name," said they, " and 
 call it rebellion." "What name you please," replied the 
 mild-tempered Monmouth. He was sure he was going to 
 everlasting happiness, and considered the serenity of his mind 
 in his present circumstances as a certain earnest of the favour 
 of his Creator. His repentance, he said, must be true, for he 
 had no fear of dying; he should die like a lamb. "Much 
 may come from natural courage," was the unfeeling and 
 stupid reply of one of the assistants. Monmouth, with that 
 modesty inseparable from true bravery, denied that he was in 
 general less fearful than other men, maintaining that his 
 present courage was owing to his consciousness that God had 
 forgiven him his past transgressions, of all which generally 
 he repented with all his soul. 
 
 At last the reverend assistants consented to join w T ith him 
 in prayer, but no sooner were they risen from their kneeling 
 posture than they returned to their charge. Not satisfied 
 with what had passed, they exhorted him to a true and 
 thorough repentance: would he not pray for the king? and 
 send a dutiful message to his majesty to recommend the 
 
 1 Vide Somers's Tracts, i. 435. 
 
1685.] Monmouth's execution. 441 
 
 duchess and his children? "As you please," was the reply; 
 " I pray for him and for all men." He now spoke to the execu- 
 tioner, desiring that he might have no cap over his eyes, and 
 began undressing. One would have thought that in this last 
 sad ceremony, the poor prisoner might have been unmolested, 
 and that the divines would have been satisfied, that prayer was 
 the only part of their function for which their duty now 
 called upon them. They judged differently, and one of them 
 had the fortitude to request the duke, even in this stage of the 
 business, that he would address himself to the soldiers then 
 present, to tell them he stood a sad example of rebellion, and 
 entreat the people to be loyal and obedient to the king. " I 
 have said I will make no speeches," repeated Monmouth, in 
 a tone more peremptory than he had before been provoked to; 
 " I will make no speeches. I come to die." " My lord, ten 
 words will be enough," said the persevering divine; to which 
 the duke made no answer, but turning to the executioner, 
 expressed a hope that he would do his work better now than 
 in the case of lord Russell. He then felt the axe, which he 
 apprehended was not sharp enough, but being assured that it 
 was of proper sharpness and weight, he laid down his head. 
 In the meantime, many fervent ejaculations were used by the 
 reverend assistants, who, it must be observed, even in these 
 moments of horror, showed themselves not unmindful of the 
 points upon which they had been disputing, praying God to 
 accept his imperfect and general repentance. 
 
 The executioner now struck the blow, but so feebly or 
 unskilfully, that Monmouth, being but slightly wounded, 
 lifted up his head, and looked him in the face as if to upbraid 
 him, but said nothing. The two following strokes were as 
 ineffectual as the first, and the headsman, in a fit of horror, 
 declared he could not finish his work. The sheriffs threatened 
 him; he was forced again to make a further trial, and in two 
 more strokes separated the head from the body. 
 
 Thus fell, in the thirty-sixth year of his age, James, duke 
 of Monmouth, a man against whom all that has been said by 
 the most inveterate enemies both to him and. his party, 
 amounts to little more than this, that he had not a mind equal 
 to the situations in which his ambition, at different times, en- 
 gaged him to place himself. But to judge him with candour, 
 we must make great allowances, not only for the temptations 
 
442 HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF JAMES II. [1685. 
 
 into which he was led by the splendid prosperity of the earlier 
 parts of his life, but also for the adverse prejudices with 
 which he was regarded by almost all the contemporary 
 writers, from whom his actions and character are described. 
 The tories, of course, are unfavourable to him; and even among 
 the whigs, there seems, in many, a strong inclination to dis- 
 parage him; some to excuse themselves for not having joined 
 him, others to make a display of their exclusive attachment to 
 their more successful leader, king William. Burnet says of 
 Monmouth, that he was gentle, brave, and sincere: to these 
 praises, from the united testimony of all who knew him, we 
 may add that of generosity; and surely those qualities go a 
 great way in making up the catalogue of all that is amiable 
 and estimable in human nature. One of the most conspicuous 
 features in his character seems to have been a remarkable, and, 
 as some think, a culpable degree of flexibility. That such a 
 disposition is preferable to its opposite extreme, will be ad- 
 mitted by all who think that modesty, even in excess, is more 
 nearly allied to wisdom than conceit and self-sufficiency. He 
 who has attentively considered the political, or, indeed, the 
 general concerns of life, may possibly go still further, and 
 rank a willingness to be convinced, or in some cases even 
 without conviction, to concede our own opinion to that of 
 other men, among the principal ingredients in the composi- 
 tion of practical wisdom. Monmouth had suffered this 
 flexibility, so laudable in many cases, to degenerate into a 
 habit which made him often follow the advice, or yield to the 
 entreaties, of persons whose characters by no means entitled 
 them to such deference. The sagacity of Shaftesbury, the 
 honour of Russel, the genius of Sidney, might, in the opinion 
 of a modest man, be safe and eligible guides. The partiality 
 of friendship, and the conviction of his firm attachment, might 
 be some excuse for his listening so much to Grey; but he 
 never could, at any period of his life, have mistaken Fergu- 
 son for an honest man. There is reason to believe, that the 
 advice of the two last-mentioned persons had great weight in 
 persuading him to the unjustifiable step of declaring himself 
 king. But far the most guilty act of this unfortunate man's 
 life was his lending his name to the declaration which was 
 published at Lyme, and in this instance Ferguson, who penned 
 the paper, was both the adviser and the instrument. To 
 
1685.] CHARACTER OF MONMOUTH. 443 
 
 accuse the king of having burnt London, murdered Essex in 
 the Tower, and, finally, poisoned his brother, unsupported by 
 evidence to substantiate such dreadful charges, was calumny 
 of the most atrocious kind; but the guilt is still heightened, 
 when we observe, that from no conversation of Monmouth, 
 nor, indeed, from any other circumstance whatever, do we 
 collect that he himself believed the horrid accusations to be 
 true. With regard to Essex's death in particular, the only 
 one of the three charges which was believed by any man of 
 common sense, the late king was as much implicated in the 
 suspicion as James. That the latter should have dared to be 
 concerned in such an act, without the privacy of his brother, 
 was too absurd an imputation to be attempted, even in the 
 days of the popish plot. On the other hand, it was certainly 
 not the intention of the son to brand his father as an assassin. 
 It is too plain that, in the instance of this declaration, Mon- 
 mouth, with a facility highly criminal, consented to set his 
 name to whatever Ferguson recommended as advantageous to 
 the cause. Among the many dreadful circumstances attend- 
 ing civil wars, perhaps there are few more revolting to a good 
 mind, than the wicked calumnies with which, in the heat of 
 contention, men, otherwise men of honour, have in all ages 
 and countries permitted themselves to load their adversaries. 
 It is remarkable that there is no trace of the divines who at- 
 tended this unfortunate man, having exhorted him to a par- 
 ticular repentance of his manifesto, or having called for a re- 
 traction or disavowal of the accusations contained in it. They 
 w r ere so intent upon points more immediately connected with 
 orthodoxy of faith, that they omitted pressing their penitent to 
 the only declaration by which he could make any satisfactory 
 atonement to those whom he had injured. 
 
444 HISTORY OP THE REIGN OF JAMES II. 
 
 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 The following detached paragraphs were probably intended 
 for the fourth chapter. They are here printed in the in- 
 complete and unfinished state in which they were found. 
 
 "While the whigs considered all religious opinions with a 
 view to politics, the tories, on the other hand, referred all 
 political maxims to religion. Thus the former, even in their 
 hatred to popery, did not so much regard the superstition, or 
 imputed idolatry of that unpopular sect, as its tendency to es- 
 tablish arbitrary power in the state, while the latter revered 
 absolute monarchy as a divine institution, and cherished fr the 
 doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance as articles of 
 religious faith. 
 
 To mark the importance of the late events, his majesty 
 caused two medals to be struck; one of himself, with the 
 usual inscription, and the motto, Aras et sceptra tuemur ; the 
 other of Monmouth, without any inscription. On the reverse 
 of the former, were represented the two headless trunks of his 
 lately vanquished enemies, with other circumstances in the 
 same taste and spirit, the motto, Ambitio malesuada ruit ; on 
 that of the latter appeared a young man falling in the attempt 
 to climb a rock with three crowns on it, under which was the 
 insulting motto, Superi risere. 
 
 With the lives of Monmouth and Argyle ended, or at least 
 seemed to end, all prospect of resistance to James's absolute 
 power; and that class of patriots who feel the pride of sub- 
 mission, and the dignity of obedience, might be completely 
 satisfied that the crown was in its full lustre. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 445 
 
 James was sufficiently conscious of the increased strength, 
 of his situation, and it is probable that the security he now 
 felt in his power inspired him with the design of taking more 
 decided steps in favour of the popish religion and its pro- 
 fessors, than his connexion with the church of England party 
 had before allowed him to entertain. That he from this time 
 attached less importance to the support and affection of the 
 tories is evident from lord Rochester's observations, commu- 
 nicated afterwards to Burnet. This nobleman's abilities and 
 experience in business, his hereditary merit, as son of lord 
 chancellor Clarendon, and his uniform opposition to the exclu- 
 sion bill, had raised him high in the esteem of the church 
 party. This circumstance, perhaps, as much, or more than 
 the king's personal kindness to a brother-in-law, had contri- 
 buted to his advancement to the first office in the state. As 
 long, therefore, as James stood in need of the support of the 
 party, as long as he meant to make them the instruments of his 
 power, and the channels of his favour, Rochester was, in every 
 respect, the fittest person in whom to confide; and accord- 
 ingly, as that nobleman related to Burnet, his majesty 
 honoured him with daily confidential communications upon 
 all his most secret schemes and projects. But upon the defeat of 
 the rebellion, an immediate change took place, and from the 
 day of Monmouth's execution, the king confined his conver- 
 sations with the treasurer to the mere business of his office. 
 

INDEX. 
 
 Aberdeen, earl of, recalled from the 
 government of Scotland, 179. 
 
 Abhorrers and Petitioners, 145. 
 
 Absolute power, its various opponents 
 under Charles I., 19; its extinction as 
 a principle in England, 23; efforts of 
 the York party to extend it, 183 ; the 
 chief aim of James II. and of his pre- 
 decessors, 347. 
 
 Adda, the nuncio d', reception of at 
 Windsor, 235. 
 
 Addresses, servile, to James II., 340. 
 
 American colonies, British, lord Hali- 
 fax's views respecting, 324. 
 
 Anglicnn preachers and prelates, their 
 firm resistance to popery under James, 
 214. 
 
 Arbitrary power, progress of, 217. 
 
 Argyle, earl of, persecuted, 63; executed, 
 64; the object of the duke of York's 
 hostility, 159 ; the proviso he added 
 on taking the new test, 160; is im- 
 peached and condemned to death, but 
 escapes, ib. ; his estates confiscated, 
 161 ; makes a descent upon Scotland, 
 is taken and executed, 194; account of, 
 378 ; motives of his policy in his de- 
 scent upou Scotland, 389 ; circum- 
 stances which led to the discovery of 
 his expedition, ib. ; observations upon 
 his method of proceeding, 391 ; divi- 
 sions among his followers, 392 ; de- 
 tailed account of his expedition, ib. 
 et seq. ; particulars of his capture, 396 ; 
 his noble deportment under defeat, 
 397 ; particulars of his last days, 399, 
 et seq. ; his genuine piety, 400 ; account 
 of his death, 404 ; fate of his followers, 
 407. 
 Arlington, lord, impeached, 110. 
 Aristocracy, popular inroads upon, 8. 
 Armstrong, an ex-officer, attends a meet- 
 ing of conspirators against the govern- 
 
 ment at Shepherd's, 168 ; disgraceful 
 conduct towards him of the king, 177 ; 
 his execution, ib. 
 
 Army, the, its victory over the presby- 
 terian parliament, 37 ; difficulties oc- 
 casioned by the question of disband- 
 ing the, 41 ; condition and views of 
 as a party after the death of Crom- 
 well, 47 ; increase of, under Jame3 II., 
 205 ; its earnest hostility to popery, 
 218. 
 
 Augsburg, league of, 262. 
 
 Ayloff, Mr., his interview with James, 
 197 ; is executed, ib. 
 
 Baillée, a Scottish presbyterian, inter- 
 rogated by the king, 172 ; execution 
 of, 179. 
 
 Baxter, Richard, his trial and punish- 
 ment, 191 ; characterized, 343. 
 
 Beaufort, duke of, obtains a verdict 
 against the denouncers of The Plot, 
 182. 
 
 Bedloe, William, comes forward as a 
 witness against the papists in The 
 Plot, 128 ; his narrative, ib. 
 
 Bishops, the Anglican, their self-inte- 
 rested sanctions of the tyrannical pre- 
 tensions of James I., 15 ; petition of 
 the, to the king against the reading of 
 the ordinance of toleration, 241 ; sum- 
 moned before the council, 242 ; conduct 
 of the populace on their being sent to 
 the Tower, 244; trial of, 247, 
 
 Blood, colonel, his attempt to murder 
 the duke of Ormond, 97. 
 
 Bothwell bridge, battle of, 142. 
 
 Breda, declaration of, 51. 
 
 Bridgeman, chancellor, his comprehen- 
 sion bill, 85. 
 
 Buckingham, Villiers, duke of, his assas- 
 sination, 20. 
 
 , George Villiers, duke of, cha- 
 
448 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 terized, 71; his mission to Holland,102 
 its failure, «6. ; impeachment of, 110. 
 Burnet, Gilbert, remark of his as to the 
 house of commons, 146 ; claimed of the 
 States by d'Albe ville, 229 ; account of, 
 229, 230 ; draws up a document setting 
 forth the claims of William, and the 
 reasons for inviting him to the throne, 
 260 ; statement of his as to James's 
 views on the balance of power, 344. 
 
 Cabal Ministry, formation of the, 88 ; 
 its unconstitutional issue of parliamen- 
 tary writs, 103; broken up, 110; its 
 unprincipled, character 303; betrayed 
 by the king, ib. 
 
 Cameron and Cargill, their insurrection, 
 15S. 
 
 Catholics, Roman, their loyalty through- 
 out the civil war and protectorate, G 9 ; 
 their religion preferred at court, 70 ; 
 endeavour of Charles to procure tole- 
 ration for them, ib ; hatred towards 
 them of the English people, ib.; oppo- 
 sition to the court engendered by its 
 efforts to favour them, 72 ; prosecution 
 of, as accomplices in the plot, 129 ; 
 made the victims of the various views 
 of parties, 130 ; their alarm at the 
 prospect of James dying without a 
 popish heir, 219; divide into two 
 parties, high and low, 220 ; distinction 
 between these, ib. ; attempt to invade 
 the universities, 233. 
 
 lords, quit the Tower, 182. 
 
 Catholics, high, leaders of the party, 222 ; 
 their projects with reference to a 
 popish heir, 224. 
 
 Cavaliers, formation of this party, 29 ; 
 neglect of by the king, 80 ; party of the 
 old, their views, 113. 
 
 Charles I., circumstances under which 
 he acceded to the throne, 18 ; his 
 commencement of tyranny, ib. ; ex- 
 cites the hostility of the lawyers, 19 ; 
 characterized, 21 ; his pertinacious 
 adherence to absolutist views, 35 ; 
 observations on his trial and execu- 
 tion, 38; effect of his death upon 
 various classes, 39 ; his statue set up 
 at Charing Cross, 113; historical im- 
 portance of his reign, 293 ; his execu- 
 tion, inquiry into its character, 296 ; 
 its inutility as an immediate example, 
 but it raised England in the opinion 
 of Europe, 298. 
 
 Charles II. offends the Scots by his 
 loose conduct, 39 ; his irresolute con- 
 duct, 40 ; his view of the Revolution, 
 54 ; his ruling ideas, ib. ; rejoicings at 
 his return, 55; his first ministry, 61; 
 its singularly various composition cha 
 racterized, 62 ; requires the repeal of 
 the triennial bill, 73 ; meets much re- 
 probation for the cruelties exercised 
 upon the Scottish presbyterians, 79; 
 his neglect of the cavaliers, 80 ; seeks 
 to promote his political views with 
 the absolutists by affecting zeal for 
 popery, 89 ; his new arrangement with 
 Louis XIV., ib. ; his proceedings 
 in fulfilment of it, 90 ; explanation 
 of his interest in a Dutch war, 91 ; un- 
 blushing profligacy of his court, 94; 
 his personal attempts to gain the lords 
 to his views, 95 ; the affronts he sub- 
 jected himself to, 96 ; suspends the 
 penal laws against papists and non- 
 conformists of his own authority, 98 ; 
 his address to the parliament of 1673, 
 103 ; his new policy in the com- 
 mencement of 1674, 111; fresh ar- 
 rangement with Louis XIV., 112 ; fur- 
 ther agreement with France, 116 ; com- 
 pelled to make preparations to carry 
 out the alliance with Holland, 122 ; his 
 insolent reply to the Scottish presby- 
 terian lords, 123 ; his letters applying 
 to France for money laid before parlia- 
 ment by lord Montague, 133 ; attempts 
 to shield Danby with his own inviola- 
 bility, 136 ; forms a new privy coun- 
 cil, 137; consents to limitations upon 
 the succession of his brother, 139; 
 sudden illness of, 143 ; attempts to get 
 more money from Louis by threats, 
 which wholly fail, 146 ; his address to 
 the parliament at Oxford, 152 ; dis- 
 solves it, and returns to London, 153 ; 
 his manifesto explaining his conduct, 
 155 ; the benefit he derived from the 
 dissolution, 156 ; receives loyal ad- 
 dresses from all quarters, ib. ; inter- 
 feres in the election of sheriffs for Lon- 
 don, 162 ; sends Jeffreys on a special 
 commission against the whigs, 178 ; 
 misunderstanding between him and 
 the duke of York, 184; sanctions a 
 project of Monmouth against the duke 
 of York, 185; death of, ib. ; account 
 of his last moments, ib. ; suspicions as 
 to the cause of his death, ib. ; remarks 
 
INDEX. 
 
 449 
 
 on the subject, 1S6 ; neglect exhibited 
 to his remains, ib. ; historical import- 
 ance and singular character of his 
 reign, 300 ; excellent laws passed un- 
 der it, 301 ; observations upon it, ib. ; 
 his base dependence upon Louis XIY., 
 302 ; his utter want of good faith, ib. ; 
 his designs suspected by the people, 
 306 ; his utter indifference to every- 
 thing but his own personal interests, 
 312 ; his cold cruelty towards Alger- 
 non Sidney, 317 ; his condition of 
 mind shortly before his death, 323 ; 
 character of, 325 ; reflections upon his 
 reign, 32 7. 
 
 Charters of the boroughs and corporate 
 bodies, assailed by the court, 161; 
 violent seizure of through England, 
 by Charles, 321. 
 
 Church of England, opposition of, to the 
 measures of Charles, in 1671, 99 ; at- 
 tacks upon the, by the presbyterians, 
 150. 
 
 Church, a proposition to unite the An- 
 glican with the presbyterian, 150. 
 
 Church party in 16S5, characterized, 375. 
 
 Churchill, lord, engages in the plan of 
 inviting over the prince of Orange, 257. 
 
 Citizen class, progress of, 6 ; and work- 
 men, their mistaken encouragement of 
 the restoration, 50. 
 
 Civil resistance in England, ever fruit- 
 less without the aid of parliament, 315. 
 
 Clarendon, earl of, his speech to the se- 
 cond parliament of Charles IL, 65 ; his 
 disgrace, 81 ; charges against him, 82 ; 
 Lord Southampton's opinion of him, S3. 
 
 Clarendon, earl of, made viceroy of Ire- 
 land, 203 ; recalled, 217 ; comparative 
 excellence of his administration, 301. 
 
 Clifford, lord treasurer, corrupts the 
 house of commons with money, 96 ; his 
 denunciation of the lower house, 107. 
 
 Coke, Mr., his spirited language, 209; is 
 sent to the Tower, ib. 
 
 Coleman, the Jesuit, discovery of certain 
 letters of his, 126. 
 
 College, the joiner, executed, 15S. 
 
 Committee of religion, its report, 369. 
 
 Commons of England, progress of their 
 liberties, 4 ; their first introduction 
 into the legislature, ib. 
 
 , house of, position of, under 
 
 Henry YIIL, 9 ; under Elizabeth, 10 ; 
 the assertion of religious reform under 
 Elizabeth, 13 ; their resistance to the 
 
 Jure Bivino pretensions of James I., 
 16 ; their conduct in the first parliament 
 of Charles I., IS; appoint grievance 
 committees, 23; their excess of loy- 
 alty on the return of Charles IL, 53 ; 
 its continued and deeply infamous ser- 
 vility, 56 ; exceeds the king in vindic- 
 tiveness against the regicides, ib. : op- 
 position of, to the catholic tendencies 
 of Charles IL, 73; venality of, imder 
 the first years of the Cabal ministry, 
 91 ; declaration of, in 1679, against the 
 duke of York, 1 3 S ; energetic measures of 
 in the session of 1679, 140 ; its address 
 to James, 207 ; the king's reply, 209^ 
 laudable conduct of, 1674-5, 309. 
 
 Commonwealth, efficiency of its govern- 
 ment, 40, 41. 
 
 Comprehension bill, rejected by the com- 
 mons, S5. 
 
 Constitution, the inefficiency of, unless 
 administered by upright government, 
 301. 
 
 Conventicles, act passed against. 75. 
 
 Convention parliament assembles, 279; 
 its composition, 2 SO. 
 
 Cornish and Bethell made sheriffs, 145. 
 
 Corporation act, passed, G 6 ; new oath 
 imposed by it, ib. 
 
 Corporations, nature of, 165. 
 
 Counter-revolution, characterized, 1 ; 
 and the resistance to it, distinguished 
 from the previous revolution, ib. ; 
 commencement of, 46 : its favourable 
 position after the dissolution of the 
 Oxford parliament, 157 ; becomes a 
 resistance to the claims of the prince 
 of Orange, 223. 
 
 Court of delegates instituted, 215. 
 
 Coventry, sir John, the offence he give* 
 the court by a parliamentary sally of 
 his, 96 ; his disgraceful treatment by 
 command of the king, ib. ; his immense 
 popularity inconsequence, ib. 
 
 Coventry, sir William, demands the 
 energetic interposition of England in 
 favour of Holland, US. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, first appearance of, 
 29 ; his great popularity with the in- 
 dependents, 30 ; organizes a regiment, 
 ib. ; its superiority over the other par- 
 liamentary troops, 31; he is made a 
 general, ib.; his cautious policy, 33; 
 progress of his machinations, 31 ; his 
 energy and ability regarding the revor 
 lutionary movement, 35 ; declaration 
 G G 
 
4o0 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 against, by the presbyterians, 86 ; his [ 
 energetic conduct under the circum- i 
 stances, ib.; his military successes, ib.; 
 his policy immediately preceding the 
 trial of Charles I., 38; defeats the ; 
 enemies of the revolution in the three j 
 kingdoms, S 9 ; unites England and 
 Scotland in one republic, 40 ; seizes 
 upon power, 42 ; the feeling enter- , 
 tained towards him by the people, 
 ib. ; character of his administration, 
 43 ; makes England respected abroad, 
 ib. ; remarks upon his conduct, ib. ; ; 
 character of, 299. 
 
 Cromwell, liichard, resigns the protec- 
 t orate, 46. 
 
 Crown, question as to what shall be the ; 
 power of the, discussed, 311. 
 
 D'Aeeeyiele, marquis, sent to Hoi- I 
 
 land as envoy, 228. 
 Dalzel, general, sent against the Scot- j 
 
 tish presbyterians, 7 7 ; his cruelties, 
 
 7$. 
 Danby, earl of, made minister, 112; pro- 
 
 poses the dissolution of parliament, ! 
 
 134 ; is sent to the Tower, 136. 
 Danby administration, its plans, 113 ; I 
 
 decline of its parliamentary support, 
 
 117; its corrupt measures to gain j 
 
 recruits, ib. 
 Dangerfield, denounces the Meal Tub ; 
 
 plot, 147 ; killed by the mob, 191. 
 Dartmouth, lord, commands the king's 
 
 fleet, 269. 
 Denmark, princess of, her unexpected 
 
 return from Bath interrupts the 
 
 arrangements for the queen's ac- 
 couchement, 245. 
 Declaration prepared by Charles II. for 
 
 proclamation just before his death, 322. 
 Declaration of Eights, the, 284. 
 Despotism, its progress under Charles I., 
 
 21 ; resistance toit, 22. 
 Desborough, general, his ambitious 
 
 views, 47. 
 Devonshire, duke of, his observation on 
 
 James's speech, 206. 
 Divine and indefeasible right, a prepos- 
 terous proposition, 312 ; theory of, 
 
 propounded by James I., 15. 
 Drummond, general, sent against the 
 
 Scottish presbyterians, 77. 
 Dunkirk, sale of, to the French, 73. 
 Dutch war, how favourable to the views 
 
 of Charles II., 92. 
 
 Dutch war, the first, disgraceful character 
 of, 303 ; the second, utter infamy of, 
 ib. ; the object of both, ib. ; conse- 
 quence of, 304. 
 
 Dykvelt sent by the States to England 
 on a state mission, 228. 
 
 Elizabeth, queen, her treatment of the 
 parliament, 10 ; her aversion to par- 
 liamentary forms, 13. 
 
 Enfranchisements, individual, progress 
 of, 6. 
 
 England, her prosperous condition under 
 the commonwealth, 40 ; state of, upon 
 the death of Cromwell, 45 ; her pro - 
 gress between 1588 and 1640, 292. 
 
 English nation, apathy of, after Crom- 
 well's death, 2 99. 
 
 Episcopacy, its re-establishment set on 
 foot, 61 ; in Scotland, the tool of ab- 
 solute power, 159. 
 
 Essex, earl of, made minister, 137; cha- 
 racterized, ib. ; on being sent to the 
 Tower commits suicide, 173. 
 
 Exchequer, government arbitrarily closes 
 the, in order to create funds in the 
 absence of a parliament, 98. 
 
 Exclusion of the duke of York, discussed 
 in the council, 139. 
 
 Exclusion Bill passes the commons, 140 ; 
 again passed by the commons, 148 ; 
 rejected by the lords, ib. ; observations 
 upon the propriety of its discussion, 310. 
 
 Extraordinary tribunals, their tyranny 
 under Elizabeth, 13 ; characterised, 18. 
 
 Fagg, sir John, his dispute with the lords 
 occasions the prorogation of parlia- 
 ment, 116. 
 
 Favourites of Charles II. characterized, 
 70. 
 
 Female presbyterians drowned by the 
 king's troops, 357. 
 
 Ferdinand of Bavaria, elector of Cologne, 
 death of, 262. 
 
 Feversham, lord, defeats Monmouth at 
 Sedgmoor, 195 ; receives the command 
 of the camp at Hounslow, 269. 
 
 Fitzharris, affair of, 151 ; executed, 157. 
 
 Five-mile Act passed, 75. 
 
 Fleetwood, general, has ambitious views, 
 47. 
 
 Fletcher of Saltoun characterized, 384. 
 
 Fleet, its warm hostility to popery, 219 ; 
 the, mutiny in against the papists, 
 259. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 451 
 
 Force, armed, of the kingdom, disposed 
 of, declared by the second parliament 
 of Charles II. to be vested in the king, 
 67. 
 
 French protestant exiles, their cordial 
 reception in England, 204. 
 
 Furstemburg, cardinal de, a candidate 
 for the electorship of Cologne, sup- 
 ported by Louis XI V., and opposed by 
 Rome, 262. 
 
 Godfrey, sir Edmondsbury, murder of, 
 127 ; his immense popularity, ib. 
 
 Government established by military 
 force, its almost invariable nature, 298. 
 
 Gower, Leveson, proposes that the house 
 of commons shall separate of itself, 
 151. 
 
 Graham of Claverhouse, his cruelty, 358. 
 
 Grey, lord of AY ark, characterized, 384. 
 
 Guildhall, meeting at, of the privy coun- 
 cil and lords, who invite William to 
 take the administration upon himself, 
 277. 
 
 Guthrie, execution of, 64. 
 
 Habeas Corpus act passed, 141 ; charac- 
 terized, 309. 
 
 Hales, sir Edward, affair of, 212. 
 
 Halifax, lord, characterized, 133; dis- 
 missed by James II. for refusing to 
 encourage popery, 201 ; his consequent 
 restoration to popularity, 202 ; high 
 catholic hostility to, 323; objections 
 they advanced against him, ib. 
 
 Halloway,the conspirator, executed, 177. 
 
 Hamilton, the duke of, the object of the 
 duke of York's hostility, 159; his con- 
 duct, ib. 
 
 Hampden, John, condemned to an enor- 
 mous fine, 177 ; suicide of, 197. 
 
 Harvey, Mr. privy purse, anecdote of 
 him, 117. 
 
 Henry VIL, source of his power, 7 ; 
 character of his government, S ; his 
 encouragement of talent, ib. ; conse- 
 quence of his reign, 292. 
 
 Henry Till., his assumption of spiritual 
 supremacy, 11. 
 
 Herbert, admiral, prepares for the em- 
 barkation of the troops from Holland, 
 264 ; departure of for England, 267. 
 
 Highlanders of Scotland employed by 
 Lauderdale against the presbyterians, 
 122. 
 
 Historians, their adulation of deceased 
 
 kings even more pernicious than that 
 of the living, 318. 
 
 Historians, tory, their partial view of 
 James IL's conduct, 346. 
 
 History, manner in which it should be 
 read, 293. 
 
 Holland, rupture of England with, 74 ; 
 war declared against, 75 ; ill success 
 of the war with, 80 ; war with, a 
 committee appointed by the commons 
 to examine the accounts of, 8 6 ; piratical 
 attempt upon some of its merchant's 
 ships by order of Charles IL, 99 ; its 
 failure, ib. ; war declared against the 
 republic, ib. ; reaction in, against re- 
 publicanism, 101; energetic resolution 
 of the States of, to resist Louis and 
 Charles, 103 ; peace with, 110 ; peace 
 between her and France, 124 ; view of 
 the States of, with regard to William's 
 enterprise against James IL, 263. 
 
 Hounslow Heath, formation of a camp 
 at, 2 IS ; unfavourable disposition of 
 the troops encamped there on the 
 trial of the bishops, 258. 
 
 Howard, lord, his disclosures as to his 
 confederates in the plot, 172. 
 
 Hume, David, his partial views of the 
 trial of Algernon Sidney, 317 ; observa- 
 tions upon his account, 318; his fabri- 
 cation of a parliamentary debate, 367. 
 
 Hume, sir Patrick, account of, 383. 
 
 Independents, the, characterized, 30 ; 
 their anxiety to serve under Cromwell, 
 31 ; then- political progress, ib.; their 
 progress in parliament, 33 ; appeal 
 of to the army, 34 ; reaction against 
 in and out of parliament, 36 ; expelled 
 from parliament by general Monk, 49 
 
 Indulgence ordinance published by 
 Charles IL, 72. 
 
 Intolerance, religious, its dangerous ef- 
 fects when used as a political weapon, 
 79. 
 
 Ireland, condition of, after the death of 
 Cromwell, 45. 
 
 James L, of England, character of his 
 mind, 14 ; his notions of Divine right, 
 15 : his reception of the English pu- 
 ritans, ib.; destroys the journals of the 
 house of commons, 17 ; is necessitated 
 to acknowledge the privileges of that 
 house, ib. 
 
 James IL, accession of, 186; his speech 
 
452 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 to the council, 1ST ; its effect upon the 
 people, ib. ; his own statement of his 
 mental reservation in making his 
 liberal professions, 1S8 ; openly attends 
 mass, ib. ; publishes two documents to 
 prove that his brother had been a 
 catholic, ib. ; retains his brother's 
 ministers in office, ib.; his object to 
 reconcile the people to popery and 
 absolutism, 18!) ; modification of his 
 ideas of action, ib. ; his first relations 
 With France, ib. ; assembles the Scot- 
 tish parliament, ib. ; tampers grossly 
 with the English elections upon his 
 accession, 190 ; his address to his first 
 parliament, 192 ; obtains a large 
 civil list, ib. ; the delight with which 
 he received the accounts of Jeffreys 
 campaign, 198; extensive views with 
 regard to Ireland, 202 ; outwardly 
 expresses an objection to the re- 
 vocation of the edict of Nantes, 204 ; 
 his address to his parliament, ib. ; 
 his anger at the commons' address, 
 208 ; assembles the Scottish parlia- 
 ment, 210 ; his address to it, ib. ; his 
 fondness for playing at generalship at 
 the Hounslow camp, 218 ; his attempt 
 to conciliate the contending sections 
 of catholics, 220 ; throws himself into 
 the arms of the high catholics, 221; 
 closets himself with all influential per- 
 sons, and members of parliament, to 
 obtain their consent to the suppression 
 of the tests, 226; sets out with the 
 queen for Bath, 236 ; his reception on 
 his way to Saint Winifred's, 237; re- 
 turns to Windsor, 238; remains in 
 London, discussing affairs with the 
 high catholics, and seeking to quell 
 the disaffected Londoners, 273 ; repairs 
 to the army, ib.; his position, 274; 
 returns to London, ib.; attempts 
 flight, 276 ; brought back to London, 
 277; returns to Rochester, 278; his 
 final flight, 279 ; assembles the pro- 
 testant lords, and advises with them, 
 275 ; sends a deputation to wait upon 
 the prince, ib. ; his desperate condi- 
 tion, 2 76; effect of his accession on 
 the popular mind, 329 ; and that of 
 his speech to the council, 331 ; his pe- 
 culiar adaptation to the purposes of 
 the tories, 332 ; offered a body of 
 troops by Louis XIV., 264; the main- 
 spring of his actions, 332 ; his first 
 
 views with reference to the Roman 
 catholic faith, ib. ; caution with which 
 his memoirs are to be read, from the 
 circumstances under which they were 
 written, 334; explains his proposed 
 policy to Barillon, ib. ; his prostrate 
 gratitude for the first donation from 
 Louis, 335 ; his attempts to obtain pe- 
 cuniary aid from France, 337; his 
 progress in tyranny, 339 ; remarks 
 upon his publishing a declaration of 
 his brother's conversion to popery, 
 342 ; his incessant applications to 
 Louis XIV. for money, 344; his utter 
 insincerity, 345 ; his immediate object 
 in seeking the French alliance, 346 ; 
 his tyranny not to be attributed solely 
 to his religion, ib. ; his treachery to 
 Queensbury, 347 ; his speech to the 
 Scottish parliament of 1685, 348; ob- 
 servations upon it, 349; observations 
 upon his political maxims, 358 ; his 
 religious views subordinate to his 
 aim at temporal tyranny, 359 ; speech 
 of his to the parliament of England in 
 1685, 373; orders the torture to be 
 applied to lord Argyle, 403. 
 
 Jeffreys, judge, his disgraceful deport- 
 ment on the trial of Sidney, 175 ; sent 
 on a special commission against the 
 whigs, 178 ; his brutal deportment to- 
 wards Baxter, 192 ; his cruelties in 
 his campaign in the western counties 
 of England, 196 ; seized by the popu- 
 lace, and taken to the Tower, where he 
 dies, 276; characterized, 342. 
 
 Jesuits, their omnipotence over the mind 
 of James IL, 191 ; are in fact the go- 
 vernment, ib. ; their vengeance upon 
 their old enemies, ib. ; increased auda- 
 city of, 214 ; interception of the let- 
 ters of, in Holland, 233; withdraw 
 from England, 275. 
 
 John, king, of England, permanent 
 benefit to the nation of his tyranny, 4. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, extract trom a work 
 of his, 183 ; popularity of the "Re- 
 monstrance to the Army," 218; ex- 
 citement produced by it in the camp 
 at Hounslow, ib. ; and in the fleet, 219. 
 
 Johnston of Westerhaugh, a murder 
 committed by his order, 362. 
 
 King's bench, court of, its despicable 
 subserviency in the case of sir Edward 
 Hales, 212. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 453 
 
 îvirke, colonel, his cruelties under judge 
 Jeffreys, 197 ; his reply to James on 
 being asked to turn papist, 213. 
 
 Lawburrows, writ of, issued by 
 Charles II., to oppress the Scots, 
 351 ; observation upon it, 352. 
 
 Lambert, general, his ambitious views, 
 17 ; raises the standard of revolt, 50; 
 his pusillanimity procures his pardon, 
 57. 
 
 Lauderdale, lord, Ins tyranny over Scot- 
 land, 122. 
 
 Lawrie of Blackwood, condemned, 356. 
 
 Leighton, archbishop, characterized, 76. 
 
 Liberty, religious, struggles for, under 
 Henry VIII. and Edward VI., 11. 
 
 Locke, John, his expulsion from college, 
 320. 
 
 London, bishop of, his trial before the 
 court of delegates, 215 ; is suspended, 
 217 ; zealous adhereuce to him of the 
 church- of-England men, ib. 
 
 , common council of, prosecuted 
 
 by the court, 165 ; decision against, 
 166. 
 
 , corporation of, its extreme 
 
 liberalism of opinions, 115. 
 
 Londoners, several thousands of them 
 escort their representatives to Oxford, 
 152. 
 
 Long parliament, its contest with the 
 army, 42. 
 
 Lords of the articles, account of the, 159. 
 
 Lords, house of, character of, under 
 Henry YIIL, 9 ; resume their func- 
 tions, 50 ; oppose the lavish subsidies 
 proposed by the commons to Charles 
 II., 95 ; their attachment to monarchi- 
 cal principles, 115; resist the bill to 
 reinstate lord Stafford, 193. 
 
 Louis XIV., his successes against the 
 Dutch, 100 ; his indignation at the 
 alliance of Charles with Holland, 1 20 ; 
 the states and towns which he an- 
 nexed to France during the ten years 
 immediately following the peace of 
 Xymegen, 261; his reasons for pen- 
 sioning James, 336. 
 Love, alderman, his spirited declaration 
 in favour of the transubstantiation 
 test, 106. 
 Ludlow, Edmund, his opinion on political 
 resistance, 386. 
 
 Magdalen College, Oxford, resistance j 
 
 of the members of, 233 ; conduct of 
 the king with regard to, 238. 
 Magna Charta, characterized, 1. 
 Mary, queen, her futile efforts in favour 
 
 of Catholicism, 12. 
 Maynard, sergeant, opposes the bill for 
 the protection of the king's person, 200. 
 Meal tub plot, denunciation of, 117. 
 Middle Temple, society of, its address to 
 
 James IL, 310. 
 Middleton, lord, his reply to the Jesuits, 
 
 213. 
 Militia, care of parliament to prevent the 
 king from having the disposal of it, 73. 
 I Military and naval troops, a new oath 
 imposed upon them, 68. 
 Monk, general, takes the lead in the 
 restoration, 19 ; distrust in which he 
 was held by the independents, 49 ; 
 character of, 300. 
 j Monks of various orders openly establish, 
 themselves in London, 211. 
 Monmouth, duke of, his clemency to the 
 Scottish presbyterians after defeating 
 them, 142 ; is made administrator of 
 Scotland, ib. ; his triumphal return 
 from Scotland, 145 ; his protest against 
 assembling the parliament at Oxford, 
 152 ; connects himself with lord Essex, 
 169; secretly visits his father, 185; 
 his project against the duke of York, 
 ib.; and his friends plan an insurrec- 
 tion, 194; lands in England, ib.; his 
 progress, 195 ; is defeated at Sedg- 
 moor, ib. ; his fruitless interview with 
 the king, 196 ; is executed, ib. ; fate of 
 his adherents, ib.; account of, 379; 
 political motives of his conduct in re- 
 ference to James, 381 ; particulars of 
 his expedition, 414, et seq. ; his letter 
 to the king, 430 ; observations upon 
 it, 431 ; particulars of his execution, 
 439; his dying declaration, 440; his 
 character, 441 ; observations upon his 
 declaration at Lyme, 413. 
 Monopolies, abolition of, under Charles I., 
 
 24. 
 Morality, stern, under the common- 
 wealth, 41. 
 Montague, lord, delivers up to parlia- 
 ment Charles' letter applying to France 
 for money, 133. 
 Mordaunt, lord, goes to Holland on a 
 mission to the prince of Orange, 253. 
 Mulgrave, earl of, his reply to the Jesuits, 
 213. 
 
454 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Murder, wholesale, of the Scottish pres- 
 byterians, 358. 
 
 Nantes, revocation of the edict of, 203. 
 
 Naseby, battle of, effects of, on the public 
 mind, 33. 
 
 Navigation act, suspension of the, 98, 
 
 Netherlands, their emancipation from 
 the Spanish yoke, 92. 
 
 Nonconforming protestants, their posi- 
 tion under Elizabeth, 14. 
 
 Nonconformists, Charles II.'s first attack 
 upon, G 2 ; general persecution, under 
 this denomination, of all the dissent- 
 ing sects, by the Anglican church, 69 ; 
 new laws against, 74; in parliament, 
 all support the test, 10 G ; the laws 
 against them actively put in force 
 again, 157 ; overtures made to the, by 
 the catholics, with a view to discover- 
 ing their dispositions, 226 ; reconcilia- 
 tion of the, 256. 
 
 Norman conquest, its effect upon the 
 Saxon population, 3. 
 
 Nymegen, negotiations at, 122. 
 
 Oates, Titus, denounces the popish plot, 
 125 ; favourable reception of his story 
 by the people, 126 ; is encouraged by 
 the parliament, 128; condemned for 
 calumniating the duke of York, 1S2 ; 
 punishment of, by the triumphant 
 Jesuits, 191. 
 
 Oath of Allegiance, the new, 2S5. 
 
 Observer, a journal so called, sent forth 
 by the bishops against the dissenters, 
 141. 
 
 Opposition, powerful composition of the, 
 in the session of 1677, 117 ; views of 
 the, in 167 9, 13S. 
 
 Orange, house of, excluded from the 
 stadtholdership, 92. 
 
 Orange, prince of (William III.), por- 
 tion intended for him in the proposed 
 partition of Holland, 100 ; made 
 stadtholder, 101 ; attempts to gain 
 him over by Louis and Charles, ib. ; 
 his reception of Buckingham, 102 ; 
 convokes a national assembly of the 
 Dutch, ib.; comes to London, 120; 
 his marriage with the princess Mary, 
 ib. ; offers to command the troops 
 against Monmouth, 195 ; invited over 
 by the protestants, 252 ; declares his 
 willingness, and ability to come over, if 
 invited by a number of distinguished 
 
 Englishmen, 256; the invitation to 
 the prince of, the deputation for, sets 
 out, 258; resolves to invade England, 
 260 ; supported by the coalesced 
 powers in his claim to the throne, 263 ; 
 preparations for the expedition to 
 England, 264, et seg.; his landing at 
 Torbay, 272 ; conduct of his adhe- 
 rents, 272,273; his studied inaction, 
 273; its effects upon the people, ib. ; 
 marches to Salisbury, the principal 
 towns declare for him, 274; receives 
 with moderation a deputation from the 
 king, 275; comes to Windsor, 277; 
 enters London, 278 ; his interview 
 with the protestant lords, ib. ; requires 
 the concurrent invitation, to undertake 
 the administration, of the common 
 council, 279 ; his address to the united 
 body, ib. ; his apparent indifference to 
 the result as regarded himself, 282; 
 his address to the lords opposed to his 
 succession, ib. ; is proclaimed king, 285» 
 
 Order, peculiarly essential to England 
 after the revolution, 42. 
 
 Orleans, duchess of, visits her brother, 
 Charles IL, 91 ; her death, ib. 
 
 Ormond, duke of, recalled from Ireland, 
 202. 
 
 Ossory, lord, his spirited intimation to 
 the duke of Buckingham, 97. 
 
 Oxford, parliament at, under Charles IL, 
 152; dissolved, 153; university, de- 
 nounces propositions of Hobbes and 
 other writers, 183 ; its noted decree 
 reprobated, 319; its address to James 
 IL, 340. 
 
 Papists, bill against, introduced into 
 the parliament of 1673, 105. 
 
 Papist functionaries compelled to resign 
 their offices by the operation of the 
 Test Act, 108. 
 
 Papist officers favoured, 182. 
 
 Parliament, declaration of its rights 
 under James I., 17 ; first, of Charles I. 
 assembled, 18 ; its efforts to extend its 
 power in 1641, 24; cause of the popular 
 enthusiasm for, in the commencement 
 of the civil war, 29 : various views in, 
 previous to the revolution of 1640, 
 35; first, of Charles IL, acts of, 58; 
 second, composition of, 65 ; com- 
 missioners under the second Charles 
 II., their tyranny in the provinces, 
 69; of 1673, opening of, 103; its 
 
INDEX. 
 
 455 
 
 opposition to popery, 104 ; repeats 
 the petition against the Jesuits, lb. ; 
 of 1673, its compromise with the king, 
 108 ; of 1675, its unmitigated distrust 
 of the king, 114 ; its measures against 
 arbitrary rule, and against the papists, 
 ib.; of 1677, presents an address in 
 favour of Holland, 118 ; grants two 
 millions to support the alliance with 
 Holland, 121 ; of 1679, its thorough 
 adoption of the Popish Plot, 128 ; its 
 patronage of Gates, ib. ; its formal 
 declaration as to the existence of The 
 Plot, 129; its general character be- 
 tween the Restoration and The 
 Plot, 130; of 1679, its composi- 
 tion and views, 135 ; its determined 
 attack upon Danby, 136 ; of 1680, its 
 embittered opposition, 146; its cam- 
 paign against the abhorrers, 147; 
 assembled at Oxford, 152 ; its com- 
 position, ib. ; protest against the pro- 
 ceeding, ib. ; the king's address to it, 
 ib. ; dissolved, 153 ; composition of the 
 first, under James II., 190; first, of 
 James IL, large civil list it grants to 
 him, 192 ; its resistance to the bill for 
 the protection of the king's person, 
 199 ; adds a restrictive clause to the 
 bill, 200 ; differences of opinion in, 
 as to the succession, 281; of 16 35, 
 the king's opening speech to it, 363 ; 
 observations upon it, 364. 
 
 Parties, reappearance of, after the death 
 of Cromwell, 46 ; outward reconcilia- 
 tion between, on the Restoration, 55 ; 
 relation between, at the arrival of 
 William in London, 279. 
 
 Puritans, their reception by James I., 15. 
 
 Peasantry in England, hard condition of, 
 5 ; its amelioration, 6 ; their progress 
 there, 7. 
 
 Penn, the Quaker, persuaded by the 
 catholics to favour toleration, 226 ; his 
 mission to Holland, 228. 
 
 People of England, their hopes rest in 
 the prospect of William's accession, 219. 
 
 Perth, lord, appointed to the government 
 of Scotland, 179 ; replaces Queensbury 
 in the government of Scotland, 202. 
 
 Petition of Right, the, 20. 
 
 Petitions, public, to parliament, rise and 
 progress of, 6. 
 
 Petre, father, his power over the king, 
 222. 
 
 Pilkington, ex-sheriff, fined for speaking 
 ill of the duke of York, 163. 
 
 Plot, the popish, denunciation of, by 
 Dr. Tongue, 125 ; its use to parliament, 
 131 ; observations on, and progress of, 
 ib. et seq. ; manifestation of the, public 
 fury against those charged with it, 141; 
 term of the popular frenzy respect- 
 ing, 150; its incredible nature, 306; 
 observations upon it, 307 ; it was 
 clearly a forgery, ib. ; discredit attach- 
 able to all concerned in it, 308; long 
 continuance of the belief in, 341. 
 
 Pollexfen defends the common council, 
 165. 
 
 Popery, extensive conversions to, at the 
 latter end of Charles' reign, 182. 
 
 Popish riots in London, 276. 
 
 Popular leaders, the more eminent, their 
 views on the first revolution, 294. 
 
 Portsmouth, unfavourable disposition of 
 the troops in that town, 258. 
 
 Posthumous infamy; the dread of, the 
 only check upon bad kings, 31S. 
 
 Presbyterians, decline of in popular esti- 
 mation, 32 ; their resistance to the In- 
 dependents, 33. 
 
 members, eleven of them ex- 
 pelled the house of commons, 35. 
 
 Scottish, their delays in joining 
 
 Argyle, 393. 
 
 Press, its progress under Henry YIII. 
 and Mary, 68 ; its active share in dis- 
 cussing the exclusion question and that 
 of royal prerogative, 141 ; liberty of 
 the, destroyed, 366. 
 
 Proclamation, one forged, in the name of 
 the prince of Orange, disseminated, 7 7 2 . 
 
 Property, great changes in, under Henry 
 VII., 8 ; displacement of, after the 
 Restoration, 59. 
 
 Proselytism, strong efforts at, by the 
 Jesuits, 213. 
 
 Protectorate, one of the most brilliant 
 eras of English history, 299. 
 
 Protestants in Ireland, massacre of, 25 ; 
 said to be sanctioned by Charles I., ib. 
 
 Protestant lords, assembled at Guildhall, 
 invite William to London, 27 7 ; their 
 interview with William at St. James's, 
 278; engage themselves to him, ib. ; 
 offer him the provisional administra- 
 tion of the kingdom, 2 70 ; their views 
 among their own body, 280. 
 
 Puritans, their rise, 11. 
 
456 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Queen, the, rumours of the pregnancy 
 of, 238 ; her accouchement, 246. 
 
 Queensbmy, dismissed by James II. for 
 refusing to promote popery, 201 ; his 
 consequent restoration to popularity, 
 202 ; his adherence to the protestant re- 
 ligion, 347 ; deceived by James II., ib. 
 
 Reformation, the, under Henry VIII., 
 its character, 11 ; early assertion of, by 
 the house of commons, 13; in Scot- 
 land, characterized, 14. 
 
 Eegicides, punishment of the, 56. 
 
 Religion, discussion on entrusting the 
 safety of to the king, 369. 
 
 Remonstrance, the, agreed to by parlia- 
 ment, 26. 
 
 Republican party, its decisive demonstra- 
 tions previous to the revolution of 
 1640, 37. 
 
 Resistance, forcible, to government, ob- 
 servations upon, 3S5. 
 
 Restoration, the liberties upon which 
 it made war, 2 ; progress of, 48 ; voted 
 by parliament, 52 ; observations upon 
 its conditions, 53 ; the disorders and 
 immorality it brought about, 55. 
 
 Revolution of 1640, its commencement, 
 28 ; the enemies it had to oppose in 
 its outset, 30 ; immediate results of, 
 40, 1-1 ; observations upon its extreme 
 character, 295. 
 
 Rochester, lord, attempt to convert him, 
 214 ; characterized, 333. 
 
 Roses, wars of the, sanguinary nature of, 7. 
 
 Roundheads or whigs, origin of tins 
 party, 29. 
 
 Royalist officers, defection of, to William, 
 273; and the troops, 274. 
 
 Royalty, views of the most enlightened 
 portion of the community respecting, 
 at the time of William's arrival, 280. 
 
 Rumbold, Mr. is executed, 197 ; his dying 
 declaration, ib,; account of, 384. 
 
 Rump parliament characterized, 47. 
 
 Rumsey and Ferguson attend a meeting 
 of conspirators against the government 
 on the part of lord Shaftesbury, 168. | 
 
 Rumsey and West, their disclosures as to j 
 the Rye House plot, 171. 
 
 Russell, admiral, sent on a mission to j 
 Holland, to announce the reconcilia- 
 tion of the nonconformists, 256. 
 
 Russell, lord W„ enters into a conspi- 
 
 racy against the government, 168; 
 attends a meeting of conspirators at 
 the house of one Shepherd, 16S ; inter- 
 rogated by the king, 172 ; trial and 
 condemnation of, 173 ; his execution, 
 174 ; his conduct, in the affair of lord 
 Stafford, blameable, 313; his con- 
 demnation wholly illegal, 316 ; the 
 veneration due to his memory, 318 ; 
 characterized, ib. 
 
 Ruyter, admiral de, his victories over 
 the English fleet, 80; sails up the 
 Thames, ib. 
 
 Rye House plot (the), formed, 170 ; dis- 
 covered, 171 ; effects of, favourable 
 to the government, 180 ; observations 
 upon the, 315; its probable nature, 
 316 ; Spratt's history of, 342. 
 
 Savoy, conference of the, 64. 
 
 Scotland, character of the religious re- 
 formation in, 14 ; makes the first at- 
 tack on the despotism of Charles I., 
 22 ; her grief at the death of Charles 
 I., 39; proclaims Charles II. ib. ; con- 
 dition of, at the accession of James II., 
 46 ; introduction of the Anglican sys- 
 tem into, 63 ; deplorable condition 
 under lord Rothes, 75 ; position of 
 things there at the accession of 
 James II., 190 ; character of the ad- 
 ministration of under Charles II. , 350. 
 
 Scottish covenant, ordered by the Eng • 
 lish parliament to be burned, 69. 
 
 Scottish parliament reconstituted under 
 Charles IL, 63 ; constitution of, 139 ; 
 assembled by James II. 210 ; dissolved 
 in consequence of its refusal to pro- 
 mote popery, 211; of 1685; its ad- 
 dress to the king, 360 ; its tyrannical 
 measures, 361; presents an address 
 against Argyle, 403, 
 
 Scottish people, their devotion to the cause 
 of Charles II. 40 ; their army defeated 
 by Cromwell, ib. 
 
 Scottish presbyterians,peculiarly assailed 
 by Charles II., 63 ; their tenacious 
 adherence to their religious belief, 76 ; 
 their mental advancement under their 
 ministers, ib. ; their persecution, 77; 
 they revolt, and are defeated, 78 ; 
 their punishment, ib. ; devotion of 
 their leaders, ib. ; rise in insurrection, 
 and are defeated at Bothwell bridge, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 457 
 
 1 42 ; oppressed under the duke of 
 York, 158; increased persecution of, 
 166 ; they desire to emigrate, 167 ; are 
 subjected to the special commission, 
 ib. ; confer, by their agents, with the 
 English malcontents, ib. ; a special 
 commission directed against them by 
 lord Aberdeen, 17 8 ; the sufferings en- 
 dured by them, ib. 
 
 Scottish presbyterian noblemen appeal 
 to the English parliament against the 
 tyranny of Lauderdale, 123. 
 
 Sedgmoor, battle of, 195. 
 
 Self-denying ordinance, decreed, 32. 
 
 Seymour, sir Edward, his speech in op- 
 position to the large civil list granted 
 to James, 367. 
 
 Shaftesbury, earl of, characterized, 48 ; 
 his active share in the restoration, ib. ; 
 his speech to the parliament of 1673, 
 103 ; his abrupt defection from the 
 government, 107; his attack on the 
 test proposed by the court, 115 ; sent 
 to the Tower, but immediately released, 
 158 ; urges the whigs to insurrection, 
 168; meets lord Essex, retires in 
 anger, and leaves England, 169 ; his 
 object in conspiring, ib. 
 
 Sharp, archbishop, characterized, 76 ; 
 murder of, 142. 
 
 Sharp, Dr., affair of, 214. 
 
 Shrewsbury, earl of, his mission to Hol- 
 land, 254. 
 
 Sidney, Algernon, joins a plot against 
 the government, 169 ; characterized, 
 ib.; interrogated by the king, 172; 
 his trial, 175 ; his dying declaration, 
 176; his execution, 177; monstrous 
 injustice and illegality of the proceed- 
 - ings against him, 316 ; Hume's partial 
 treatment of the subject, 317; the vene- 
 ration ever due to his memory, 3 IS. 
 
 Soldiers, disbanded, alleged plots of, 
 after the restoration, GG. 
 
 Southampton, lord, a friend to liberty,3 2 . 
 
 Spain, alarm of, for her possessions in 
 the Netherlands at the movement of 
 the prince of Orange, 261. 
 
 Spiritual peers, oppose the impeachment 
 of Danby, 140; proposition of the 
 commons to exclude them from the 
 trial, 141. 
 
 St. Paul's cathedral re-built, 113. 
 
 Stadtholdership, re-establishment of, in 
 
 Holland, 92. 
 Stafford, earl of, his execution, 149 ; 
 
 proposed reversal of his attainder, ob- 
 servations upon, 374. 
 Star chamber, originated, 8. 
 Stationers' company instituted, 68 ; its 
 
 privileges, ib. 
 Steward, Mr., his flight from England 
 
 and return, 230. 
 Strafford, the earl of, goes over to the 
 side of despotism, 21 ; last manifesta- 
 tion of his great powers, 24; manner 
 of his prosecution not justifiable, 294. 
 Strickland, admiral, takes priests on 
 
 board the fleet, 259. 
 Stuart party, tactics of, after the death 
 of Cromwell, 48. 
 : Subsidies, enormous, voted to Charles II. 
 under various heads, 58; the largest 
 ever yet granted, voted to the king for 
 the Dutch war, 75. 
 ' Suffolk, freeholders of, address to James 
 
 IL, 340. 
 I Sunderland, lord, made minister, 144 ; 
 
 disgrace of, 268. 
 | , countess of, her deposition re- 
 garding the pregnancy of the queen, 
 269. 
 
 Taxes, right to discuss them first as- 
 serted by the commons, 7 ; imposition 
 of new, under Charles I., 21. 
 
 Tangier, question raised respecting it, 150. 
 
 Temple, Sir William, sent as plenipoten- 
 tiary to Holland, 112; Ins advice as 
 to the formation of a new privy 
 council, 137 ; good effect of his advice 
 neutralized by the conduct of Charles, 
 ib. ; eulogized, 304. 
 
 Test Act passed, 108; its effects, ib. 
 
 Test, the, transubstantiation, 105 ; oppo- 
 sition of the court to, 106; a new one 
 proposed by the Danby ministry, 114 ; 
 a new antipapist, passed, 133 ; the 
 duke of York with difficulty excepted 
 from it, ib. ; a new, imposed by the 
 duke of York in Scotland, 160 ; its 
 progress, 161. 
 
 Tests, arbitrary exemption from the, 
 triumphant results of, for the papists, 
 217. 
 
 Toleration, general religious, under 
 Cromwell, 43. 
 
 Toleration, become the favourite topic 
 of the king and the court, 226 ; decla- 
 ration of, in England, 231. 
 
 Toleration act passed, 107; revoked, 
 108. 
 
458 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Tories, the protestant, begin to be 
 alarmed at the progress of the papists, 
 184; their joy at the accession of 
 James, 331 ; circumstance explaining 
 their conduct in promoting the revo- 
 lution, 37G. 
 
 Transubstantiation, vote abnegating, re- 
 solved by the parliament of 1673, 105. 
 
 Triennial bill repealed, 74. 
 
 Triple alliance, the, its popularity in 
 England, 86. 
 
 Troops disbanding bill passed, 111. 
 
 Turner, captain, sent against the Scot- 
 tish presbyterians, 77. 
 
 Tyrconnel, earl of, made commander-in- 
 chief in Ireland, 203 ; characterized, 
 ib. ; his active promotion of popery in 
 Ireland, 217 ; his plan of conduct with 
 regard to Ireland, 223; waits upon 
 the king at Chester, 237. 
 
 Uniformity, act of, passed, 07 ; adopted 
 by the Scottish parliament, 76. 
 
 Tac Axe y of the throne, declaration of 
 the commons declaring the, 2 SO; 
 adopted by the lords, 283. 
 
 Vane, sir EL, his noble death, 57, 
 
 Wales, prince of, birth of the supposed, 
 
 216. 
 Ward, sir Patience, persecuted, 163. 
 Warner, a Jesuit, sent over as confessor 
 
 to the king, 235 ; his influence over the 
 
 king, ib. 
 Washington, general, eulogium of, 298; 
 
 favourable nature of the circumstances 
 
 under which he acted, ib. 
 Wentworth, lady, her oath as to the 
 
 queen's pregnancy, 270. 
 Whigs and Tories, 115. 
 Whigs, the opinion which attributes their 
 
 downfall under James to the memory 
 
 of the popish plot, a fallacy, 341. 
 Wildman draws up a declaration of 
 
 reasons as to the dethronement of 
 
 James, 266. 
 
 j William III., character of, 305 ; pecu- 
 liarly favourable circumstances under 
 which he began his political career, ib. 
 
 Winifred's Well, Saint, visit of the queen 
 to, 236. 
 
 Withen, sir F., expelled as an abhorrer, 
 147. 
 
 Winnington, Mr. Solicitor, demands the 
 impeachment of lord Danby, 134. 
 
 Witt, Cornelius de, his murder, 101. 
 
 John de, account and eulogium of, 
 
 03; eulogized 304; peculiar circum- 
 stances of his fall, ib. 
 
 Worcester, the defeat of, 40. 
 
 Women involved in persecution in Scot- 
 land, 179. 
 
 Writers, many condemned to the pillory 
 for liberalism in their works, 184. 
 
 Yokk, duke of, his public conversion 
 to popery, 97 ; his marriage with the 
 catholic princess of Modena, ] 09 ; with- 
 draws from the kingdom, 135 ; declara- 
 tion against him in the commons, 
 138 ; visits his brother in his illness, 
 and gains great influence over him, 
 143; his sinister advice is adopted, 
 144 ; his oppressive conduct as ad- 
 ministrator of Scotland, 15S ; convokes 
 the Scottish parliament, 159; his hos- 
 tility to Hamilton and Argyle, ib. ; 
 returns to England, 161 ; his utterly 
 selfish conduct on the occasion of the 
 shipwreck of the vessel conveying him, 
 161; his rising influence, 181; has 
 well nigh all the charge of government 
 left to him, ib, ; his assumption of 
 royal honours, 182; resumes the post 
 of high- admiral, ib. ; disputes between 
 him and his brother, 184 ; a combina- 
 tion against him at court, 185 ; in- 
 difference exhibited by him towards 
 
 < his dead brother, 1S6. 
 
 Zueestein, M , sent to England to com- 
 pliment the king on the birth of an 
 heir, 255. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 T. C. Savill, Printer, 4, Chandos Street, Covent Garden. 
 
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