against all chance of rebellion. According to the Anglican divines, no subject could on any provocation be justified in withstanding the Lord's anointed by force. The theory of the Puritan sectaries was very different. Those sectaries had no scruple about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon. Many of them did not shrink from using the dagger of Ehud. They were probably even now meditating another western insurrection, or another Rye House Plot. James, therefore, conceived that he might safely persecute the Church if he could only gain the Dissenters. The party whose principles afforded him no guaranty would be attached to him by interest. The party whose interests he attacked would be restrained from insurrection by principle.

Influenced by such considerations as these, James, from the time at which he parted in anger with his parliament, began to meditate a general league of all Nonconformists, Catholic and Protestant, against the established religion. So early as Christmas, 1685, the agents of the United Provinces informed the States General that the plan of a general toleration had been arranged and would soon be disclosed.* The reports which had reached the Dutch embassy proved to be premature. The separatists appear, however, to have been treated with more lenity during the year 1686 than during the year 1685. But it was only by slow degrees and after many struggles that the king could prevail on himself to form an alliance with all that he most abhorred. He had to overcome an animosity not slight or capricious, not of recent origin or hasty growth, but hereditary in his line, strengthened by great wrongs inflicted and suffered through a hundred and twenty eventful years, and intertwined with all his feelings, religious, political, domestic, and personal. Four generations of Stuarts had waged a war to the death with four generations of Puritans; and, through that long war, there had been no Stuart who had hated the Puritans so much, or who had been so much hated by them, as himself. They had tried to blast his honor and to exclude him from his birthright; they had called him incendiary, cutthroat, poisoner; they had driven him from the Admiralty and the Privy Council; they had repeatedly chased him into banishment; they had plotted his assassination; they had risen against him in arms by thousands. He had avenged himself on them by havoc such as England had never before seen.

Their heads and quarters were still rotting on poles in all the market-places of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire. Aged women held in high honor among the sectaries for piety and charity had, for offences which no good prince would have thought deserving even of a severe reprimand, been beheaded and burned alive. Such had been, even in England, the relations between the king and the Puritans; and in Scotland the tyranny of the king and the fury of the Puritans had been such as Englishmen could hardly conceive. To forget an enmity so long and so deadly was no light task for a nature singularly harsh and implacable.

The conflict in the royal mind did not escape the eye of Barillon. At the end of January, 1687, he sent a remarkable letter to Versailles. The king-such was the substance of this document had almost convinced himself that he could not obtain entire liberty for Roman Catholics, and yet maintain the laws against Protestant Dissenters. He leaned, therefore, to the plan of a general indulgence; but at heart he would be far better pleased if he could, even now, divide his protection and favor between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, to the exclusion of all other religious persuasions.*

A very few days after this despatch had been written, James made his first hesitating and ungracious advances towards the Puritans. He had determined to begin with Scotland, where his power to dispense with acts of parliament had been admitted by the obsequious Estates. On the twelfth of February, accordingly, was published at Edinburgh a proclamation granting relief to scrupulous consciences.† This proclamation fully proves the correctness of Barillon's judgment. Even in the very act of making concessions to the Presbyterians, James could not conceal the loathing with which he regarded them. The toleration given to the Catholics was complete. The Quakers had little reason to complain. But the indulgence vouchsafed to the Presbyterians, who constituted the great body of the Scottish people, was clogged by conditions which made it almost worthless. For the old test, which excluded Catholics and Presbyterians alike from office, was substituted a new test, which admitted the Catholics, but excluded most of

Jan. 31
Feb. 10'

* Barillon, 1689. "Je crois que, dans le fonds, si on ne pouvoit laisser que la religion Anglicane et la Catholique établies par les loix, le Roy d'Angleterre en seroit bien plus content." + It will be found in Wodrow, Appendix, vol. ii. No. 129.

the Presbyterians. The Catholics were allowed to build chapels and even to carry the host in procession any where except in the high streets of royal burghs; the Quakers were suffered to assemble in public edifices: but the Presbyterians were interdicted from worshipping God any where but in private dwellings; they were not to presume to build meeting-houses; they were not even to use a barn or an outhouse for religious exercises; and it was distinctly notified to them that, if they dared to hold conventicles in the open air, the law which denounced death against both preachers and hearers, should be enforced without mercy. Any Catholic priest might say mass; any Quaker might harangue his brethren; but the privy council was directed to see that no Presbyterian minister presumed to preach without a special license from the government. Every line of this instrument, and of the letters by which it was accompanied, shows how much it cost the king to relax in the smallest degree the rigor with which he had ever treated the old enemies of his house.*

There is reason, indeed, to believe that, when he published this proclamation, he had by no means fully made up his mind to a coalition with the Puritans, and that his object was to grant just so much favor to them as might suffice to frighten the Churchmen into submission. He therefore waited a month, in order to see what effect the edict put forth at Edinburgh would produce in England. That month he employed assiduously, by Petre's advice, in what was called closeting. London was very full. It was expected that the parliament would shortly meet for the despatch of business; and many members were in town. The king set himself to canvass them man by man. He flattered himself that zealous Tories,—and of such, with few exceptions, the House of Commons consisted, - would find it difficult to resist his earnest request, addressed to them, not collectively, but separately, not from the throne, but in the familiarity of conversation. The members, therefore, who came to pay their duty at Whitehall were taken aside, and honored with long private interviews. The king pressed them, as they were loyal gentlemen, to gratify him in the one thing on which his heart was fixed. The question, he said, touched his personal honor. The laws enacted in the late reign by factious parliaments against the Roman Catholics had really been aimed at himself. Those

*Wodrow, Appendix, vol. ii. Nos. 128, 129, 132.

laws had put a stigma on him, had driven him from the Admiralty, had driven him from the Council Board. He had a right to expect that in the repeal of those laws all who loved and reverenced him would concur. When he found his hearers obdurate to exhortation, he resorted to intimidation and corruption. Those who refused to pleasure him in this matter were plainly told that they must not expect any mark of his favor. Penurious as he was, he opened and distributed his hoards. Several of those who had been invited to confer with him left his bed-chamber carrying with them money received from the royal hand. The judges, who were at this time on their spring circuits, were directed by the king to see those members who remained in the country, and to ascertain the intentions of each. The result of this investigation was, that a great majority of the House of Commons seemed fully determined to oppose the measures of the court.* Among those whose firmness excited general admiration was Arthur Herbert, brother of the chief justice, member for Dover, master of the robes, and rear-admiral of England. Arthur Herbert was much loved by the sailors, and was reputed one of the best of the aristocratical class of naval officers. It had been gen

erally supposed that he would readily comply with the royal wishes; for he was heedless of religion; he was fond of pleasure and expense; he had no private estate; his places brought him in four thousand pounds a year; and he had long been reckoned among the most devoted personal adherents of James. When, however, the rear-admiral was closeted, and required to promise that he would vote for the repeal of the Test Act, his answer was, that his honor and conscience would not permit him to give any such pledge. "Nobody doubts your honor," said the king, "but a man who lives as you do ought not to talk about his conscience." To this reproach, a reproach which came with a bad grace from the lover of Catharine Sedley, Herbert manfully replied, " I have my faults, sir; but I could name people who talk much more about conscience than I am in the habit of doing, and yet lead lives as loose as mine." He was dismissed from all his places; and the account of what he had disbursed and received as master of the robes was scrutinized with great and, as he complained, with unjust severity.+

* Barillon,

Bonrepaux,

Feb. 28
March 10'

May 25
June 4

1687.

168; Citters, Feb. 15; Reresby's Memoirs;

† Barillon, March 14, 1687; Lady Russell to Dr. Fitzwilliam,

It was now evident that all hope of an alliance between the Churches of England and of Rome, for the purpose of sharing offices and emoluments, and of crushing the Puritan sects, must be abandoned. Nothing remained but to try a coalition between the Church of Rome and the Puritan sects against the Church of England.

On the eighteenth of March the king informed the Privy Council that he had determined to prorogue the parliament till the end of November, and to grant, by his own authority, entire liberty of conscience to all his subjects.* On the fourth of April appeared the memorable Declaration of Indulgence.

In this declaration the king avowed that it was his earnest wish to see his people members of that church to which he himself belonged. But, since that could not be, he announced his intention to protect them in the free exercise of their religion. He repeated all those phrases which, eight years before, when he was himself an oppressed man, had been familiar to his lips, but which he had ceased to use from the day on which a turn of fortune had put it into his power to be an oppressor. He had long been convinced, he said, that conscience was not to be forced, that persecution was unfavorable to population and to trade, and that it never attained the ends which persecutors had in view. He repeated his promise, already often repeated and often violated, that he would protect the Established Church in the enjoyment of her legal rights. He then proceeded to annul, by his own sole authority, a long series of statutes. He suspended all penal laws against all classes of Nonconformists. He authorized both Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters to perform their worship publicly. He forbade his subjects, on pain of his highest displeasure, to molest any religious assembly. He also abrogated all those acts which imposed any religious test as a qualification for any civil or military office.†

That the Declaration of Indulgence was unconstitutional is a point on which both the great English parties have always been entirely agreed. Every person capable of reasoning on a political question must perceive that a monarch who is competent to issue such a declaration is nothing less than an abso

April 1; Burnet, i. 671, 672. The conversation is somewhat differently related in Clarke's Life of James, ii. 204. But that passage is not part of the king's memoirs.

* London Gazette, March 21, 168.

† Ibid. April 7, 1687.