Houses had constantly sate at Westminster, except when the plague was raging in the capital. but so extraordinary a conjuncture seemed to require extraordinary precautions. If the parliament were held in its usual place of assembling, the House of Commons might declare itself permanent, and might call for aid on the magistrates and citizens of London. The trainbands might rise to defend Shaftesbury, as they had risen forty years before to defend Pym and Hampden. The guards might be overpowered, the palace forced, the king a prisoner in the hands of his mutinous subjects. At Oxford there was no such danger. The university was devoted to the crown; and the gentry of the neighborhood were generally Tories. Here, therefore, the opposition had more reason than the king to apprehend violence.

The elections were sharply contested. The Whigs still composed a majority of the House of Commons; but it was plain that the Tory spirit was fast rising throughout the country. It should seem that the sagacious and versatile Shaftesbury ought to have foreseen the coming change, and to have consented to the compromise which the court offered: but he appears to have utterly forgotten his old tactics. Instead of making dispositions which, in the worst event, would have secured his retreat, he took up a position in which it was necessary that he should either conquer or perish. Perhaps his head, strong as it was, had been turned by popularity, by success, and by the excitement of conflict. Perhaps he had spurred his party till he could no longer curb it, and was really hurried on headlong by those whom he seemed to guide.

The eventful day arrived. The meeting at Oxford resembled rather that of a Polish diet than that of an English parliament. The Whig members were escorted by great numbers of their armed and mounted tenants and serving men, who exchanged looks of defiance with the royal guards. The slightest provocation might, under such circumstances, have produced a civil war; but neither side dared to strike the first blow. The king again offered to consent to any thing but the Exclusion Bill. The Commons were determined to accept nothing but the Exclusion Bill. In a few days the parliament was again dissolved.

The king had triumphed. The reaction, which had begun. some months before the meeting of the Houses at Oxford, now went rapidly on. The nation, indeed, was still hostile to Popery; but, when men reviewed the whole history of the plot, they

felt that their Protestant zeal had hurried them into folly and crime, and could scarcely believe that they had been induced by nursery tales to clamor for the blood of fellow-subjects and fellow-Christians. The most loyal, indeed, could not deny that the administration of Charles had often been highly blamable. But men who had not the full information which we possess touching his dealings with France, and who were disgusted by the violence of the Whigs, enumerated the large concessions which, during the last few years, he had made to his parliaments, and the still larger concessions which he had declared himself willing to make. He had consented to the laws which excluded Roman Catholics from the House of Lords, from the privy council, and from all civil and military offices. He had passed the Habeas Corpus Act. If securities yet stronger had not been provided against the dangers to which the constitution and the church might be exposed under a Roman Catholic sovereign, the fault lay not with Charles, who had invited the parliament to propose such securities, but with those Whigs who had refused to hear of any substitute for the Exclusion Bill. One thing only had the king denied to his people. He had refused to take away his brother's birthright. And was there not good reason to believe that this refusal was prompted by laudable feelings? What selfish motive could

The Exclusion Bill

faction itself impute to the royal mind? did not curtail the reigning king's prerogatives, or diminish his income. Indeed, by passing it, he might easily have obtained an ample addition to his own revenue. And what was it to him who ruled after him? Nay, if he had personal predilections, they were known to be rather in favor of the Duke of Monmouth than of the Duke of York. The most natural explanation of the king's conduct therefore seemed to be that, careless as was his temper, and loose as were his morals, he had, on this occasion, acted from a sense of duty and honor. And, if so, would the nation compel him to do what he thought criminal and disgraceful? To apply, even by strictly constitutional means, a violent pressure to his conscience, seemed to zealous Royalists ungenerous and undutiful. But strictly constitutional means were not the only means which the Whigs were disposed to employ. Signs were already discernible which portended the approach of civil war. Men who in the time of the civil war and of the Commonwealth had acquired an odious notoriety, had emerged from the obscurity in which, after the Restoration, they had hidden themselves from the

general hatred, showed their confident and busy faces every where, and appeared to anticipate a second reign of the saints. Another Naseby, another High Court of Justice, another Commonwealth, another usurper on the throne, the Lords again ejected from their hall by violence, the universities again purged, the Church again robbed and persecuted, the Puritans again dominant, to such results did the desperate policy of the opposition seem to tend.

Animated by such feelings, the majority of the upper and middle classes hastened to rally round the throne. The situation of the king bore, at this time, a great resemblance to that in which his father stood just after the grand remonstrance had been voted. But the reaction of 1641 had not been suffered to run its course. Charles the First, at the very moment when his people, long estranged, were returning to him with hearts disposed to reconciliation, had, by a perfidious violation of the fundamental laws of the realm, forfeited their confidence forever. Had Charles the Second taken a similar course, had he arrested the Whig leaders in an irregular manner, and impeached them of high treason before a tribunal which had no legal jurisdiction over them, it is highly probable that they would speedily have regained the ascendency which they had lost. Fortunately for himself he was induced, at this crisis, to adopt a policy which, for his ends, was singularly judicious. He determined to conform to the law, but at the same time to make vigorous and unsparing use of the law against his adversaries. He was not bound to convoke a parliament till three years should have elapsed. He was not much distressed for money. The produce of the taxes which

He

had been settled on him for life exceeded the estimate. was at peace with all the world. He could retrench his expenses by giving up the costly and useless settlement of Tangier; and he might hope for pecuniary aid from France. He had, therefore, ample time and means for a systematic attack on the opposition under the forms of the constitution. The judges were removable at his pleasure; the juries were nominated by the sheriffs; and in almost all the counties of England, the sheriffs were nominated by himself. Witnesses, of the same class with those who had recently sworn away the lives of Papists, were ready to swear away the lives of Whigs. The first victim was College, a noisy and violent demagogue of mean birth and education. He was by trade a joiner, and was celebrated as the inventor of the Protestant

flail.* He had been at Oxford when the parliament sate there, and was accused of having planned a rising and an attack on the king's guards. Evidence was given against him by Dugdale and Turberville, the same infamous men who had, a few months earlier, borne false witness against Stafford. In the sight of a jury of country squires no exclusionist was likely to find favor. College was convicted. The verdict was received by the crowd which filled the Court House of Oxford with a roar of exultation, as barbarous as that which he and his friends had been in the habit of raising when innocent Papists were doomed to the gallows. His execution was the beginning of a new judicial massacre, not less atrocious than that in which he had himself borne a share.

The government, emboldened by this first victory, now aimed a blow at an enemy of a very different class. It was resolved that Shaftesbury should be brought to trial for his life. Evidence was collected which, it was thought, would support a charge of treason. But the facts which it was necessary to prove were alleged to have been committed in London. The sheriffs of London, chosen by the citizens were zealous Whigs. They named a Whig grand jury, which threw out the bill. This defeat, far from discouraging those who advised the king, suggested to them a new and daring scheme. Since the charter of the capital was in their way, that charter must be annulled. It was pretended, therefore, that the city of London had by some irregularities forfeited its municipal privileges; and proceedings were instituted against the Corporation in the Court of King's Bench. At the same time those laws which had, soon after the Restoration, been enacted against Nonconformists, and which had remained dormant during the ascendency of the Whigs, were enforced all over the kingdom with extreme rigor.

Yet the spirit of the Whigs was not subdued. Though in evil plight, they were still a numerous and powerful party, and, as they mustered strong in the large towns, and especially in the capital, they made a noise and a show, more than proportioned to their real force. Animated by the recollection of past triumphs, and by the sense of present oppression, they overrated both their strength and their wrongs. It was not in their power to make out that clear and overwhelming

*This is mentioned in the curious work entitled " Ragguaglio della solenne Comparsa fatta in Roma gli otto di Gennaio, 1687, dall' illustrissimo et eccellentissimo signor Conte di Castelmaine."

Whatever they might suspect, sovereign had entered into a

case which can alone justify so violent a remedy as resistance to an established government. they could not prove that their treaty with France against the religion and liberties of England. What was apparent was not sufficient to warrant an appeal to the sword. If the Exclusion Bill had been thrown out, it had been thrown out by the Lords in the exercise of a right coeval with the constitution. If the king had dissolved the Oxford parliament, he had done so by virtue of a prerog ative which had never been questioned. If the court had, since the dissolution, taken some harsh measures, still those measures were in strict conformity with the letter of the law, and with the recent practice of the malcontents themselves. If the king had prosecuted his opponents, he had prosecuted them according to the proper forms, and before the proper tribunals. The evidence now produced for the crown was at least as worthy of credit as the evidence on which the noblest blood of England had lately been shed by the opposition. The treatment which an accused Whig had now to expect from judges, advocates, sheriffs, juries, and spectators, was no worse than the treatment which had lately been thought by the Whigs good enough for an accused Papist. If the privileges of the city of London were attacked, they were attacked, not by military violence or by any disputable exercise of prerogative, but according to the regular practice of Westminster Hall. No law was suspended. No tax was imposed by royal authority. The Habeas Corpus Act was respected. Even the Test Act was enforced. The opposition therefore could not bring home to the king, that species of misgovernment which alone could justify insurrection. And, even had his misgovernment been more flagrant than it was, insurrection would still have been criminal, because it was almost certain to be unsuccessful. The situation of the Whigs in 1682 differed widely from that of the Roundheads forty years before. Those who took up arms against Charles the First acted under the authority of a parliament which had been legally assembled, and which could not, without its own consent, be legally dissolved. The opponents of Charles the Second were private men. Almost all the military and naval resources of the kingdom had been at the disposal of those who resisted Charles the First. All the military and naval resources of the kingdom were at the disposal of Charles the Second. The House of Commons had been supported by at least half the nation against Charles the First. But those who