tle adjuring him to come out of the mystical Babylon and CHAP. ash from his lips the cup of fornications.* VI. respect Catholics. hese things gave great uneasiness to Tory churchmen. Feeling were the most respectable Roman Catholic noblemen of the ch better pleased. They might indeed have been excused able assion had, at this conjuncture, made them deaf to the Roman e of prudence and justice; for they had suffered much. testant jealousy had degraded them from the rank to ch they were born, had closed the doors of the Parliament use on the heirs of barons who had signed the Charter, I pronounced the command of a company of foot too high a st for the descendants of the generals who had conquered Flodden and Saint Quentin. There was scarcely one inent peer attached to the old faith whose honour, whose ite, whose life had not been in jeopardy, who had not sed months in the Tower, who had not often anticipated himself the fate of Stafford. Men who had been so long 1 cruelly oppressed might have been pardoned if they had erly seized the first opportunity of obtaining at once greatis and revenge. But neither fanaticism nor ambition, ther resentment for past wrongs nor the intoxication duced by sudden good fortune, could prevent the most tinguished Roman Catholics from perceiving that the ›sperity which they at length enjoyed was only temporary, 1, unless wisely used, might be fatal to them. They had n taught, by a cruel experience, that the antipathy of the tion to their religion was not a fancy which would yield to › mandate of a prince, but a profound sentiment, the owth of five generations, diffused through all ranks and rties, and intertwined not less closely with the principles the Tory than with the principles of the Whig. It was leed in the power of the King, by the exercise of his prerotive of mercy, to suspend the operation of the penal laws. might hereafter be in his power, by discreet management, obtain from the Parliament a repeal of the acts which posed civil disabilities on those who professed his religion. it if he attempted to subdue the Protestant feeling of gland by rude means, it was easy to see that the violent mmpression of so powerful and elastic a spring would be lowed by as violent a recoil. The Roman Catholic peers, Van Leeuwen, Jan. 1. and 12. 1686. r letter, though very long and very surd, was thought worth sending to the States General as a sign of the VI. CHAP. by prematurely attempting to force their way into the Priv Council and the House of Lords, might lose their mansion and their ample estates, and might end their lives as trait on Tower Hill, or as beggars at the porches of Itali convents. Cabal of violent Roma. Castelmaine. Such was the feeling of William Herbert, Earl of Powis who was generally regarded as the chief of the Roman Catholic aristocracy, and who, according to Oates, was t have been prime minister if the Popish plot had succeeded John Lord Bellasyse took the same view of the state of affair. In his youth he had fought gallantly for Charles the First. had been rewarded after the restoration with high honours and commands, and had quitted them when the Test Act wa passed. With these distinguished leaders all the noblest and most opulent members of their church concurred, excep Lord Arundell of Wardour, an old man fast sinking int second childhood. But there was at the court a small knot of Roman Catholics whose hearts had been ulcerated by old injuries, whose headCatholics. had been turned by recent elevation, who were impatient t climb to the highest honours of the state, and who, having little to lose, were not troubled by thoughts of the day e reckoning. One of these was Roger Palmer, Earl of Castelmaine in Ireland, and husband of the Duchess of Cleveland. His title had notoriously been purchased by his wife's dishonour and his own. His fortune was small. His temper, naturally ungentle, had been exasperated by his domestic vexations, by the public reproaches, and by what he had undergone in the days of the Popish plot. He had been long a prisoner, and had at length been tried for his life. Happily for him, he was not put to the bar till the first burst of popular rage had spent itself, and till the credit of the false witnesses had been blown upon. He had therefore escaped. though very narrowly.* With Castelmaine was allied one of the most favoured of his wife's hundred lovers, Henry Jermyn. whom James had lately created a peer by the title of Lord Dover. Jermyn had been distinguished more than twenty years before by his vagrant amours and his desperate duels. He was now ruined by play, and was eager to retrieve his fallen fortunes by means of lucrative posts from which the laws excluded him.† To the same party belonged an intri Jermyn. See his trial in the Collection of State Trials, and his curious manifesto, printed in 1681. + Mémoires de Grammont; Pepys Diary, Aug. 19. 1662.; Bonrepaux to Seignelay, Feb. 1686. VI. ng pushing Irishman named White, who had been much CHAP. oad, who had served the House of Austria as something ween an envoy and a spy, and who had been rewarded by White. it House for his services with the title of Marquess of beville.* Soon after the prorogation this reckless faction was Tyrconnel. engthened by an important reinforcement. Richard Talt, Earl of Tyrconnel, the fiercest and most uncompromising all those who hated the liberties and religion of England, rived at court from Dublin. Talbot was descended from an old Norman family which d been long settled in Leinster, which had there sunk to degeneracy, which had adopted the manners of the elts, which had, like the Celts, adhered to the old religion, id which had taken part with the Celts in the rebellion of 541. In his youth he had been one of the most noted arpers and bullies of London. He had been introduced to harles and James when they were exiles in Flanders, as a an fit and ready for the infamous service of assassinating e Protector. Soon after the Restoration, Talbot attempted › obtain the favour of the royal family by a service more famous still. A plea was wanted which might justify the uke of York in breaking that promise of marriage by which e had obtained from Anne Hyde the last proof of female ffection. Such a plea Talbot, in concert with some of his issolute companions, undertook to furnish. They agreed to escribe the poor young lady as a creature without virtue, hame, or delicacy, and made up long romances about tender nterviews and stolen favours. Talbot in particular related ow, in one of his secret visits to her, he had unluckily overurned the Chancellor's inkstand upon a pile of papers, and how cleverly she had averted a discovery by laying the blame of the accident on her monkey. These stories, which, if they had been true, would never have passed the lips of any but the basest of mankind, were pure inventions. Talbot was soon forced to own that they were so; and he owned it withbut a blush. The injured lady became Duchess of York. Had her husband been a man really upright and honourable, e would have driven from his presence with indignation and contempt the wretches who had slandered her. But one of the peculiarities of James's character was that no act, however wicked and shameful, which had been prompted by *Bonrepaux to Seignelay, Feb. 1686. CHAP. a desire to gain his favour, ever seemed to him deserving f disapprobation. Talbot continued to frequent the court, appeared daily with brazen front before the princess whose ruin he had plotted, and was installed into the lucrative post of chief pandar to her husband. In no long time Whitehal was thrown into confusion by the news that Dick Talbot, as he was commonly called, had laid a plan to murder the Duke of Ormond. The bravo was sent to the Tower: but in a few days he was again swaggering about the galleries, and carrying billets backward and forward between his patron and the ugliest maids of honour. It was in vain that old and discreet councillors implored the royal brothers not to countenance this bad man, who had nothing to recommend him except his fine person and his taste in dress. Talbot was not only welcome at the palace when the bottle or the dicebox was going round, but was heard with attention on matters of business. He affected the character of an Irish patriot, and pleaded, with great audacity, and sometimes with success, the cause of his countrymen whose estates had been confiscated. He took care, however, to be well paid for his services, and succeeded in acquiring, partly by the sale of his influence, partly by gambling, and partly by pimping, an estate of three thousand pounds a year. For under an outward show of levity, profusion, improvidence, and eccentric impudence, he was in truth one of the most mercenary and crafty of mankind. He was now no longer young, and was expiating by severe sufferings the dissoluteness of his youth: but age and disease had made no essential change in his character and manners. He still, whenever he opened his mouth, ranted, cursed, and swore with such frantic violence that superficial observers set him down for the wildest of libertines. The multitude was unable to conceive that a man who, even when sober, was more furious and boastful than others when they were drunk, and who seemed utterly incapable of disguising any emotion or keeping any secret, could really be a coldhearted, farsighted, scheming sycophant. Yet such a man was Talbot. In truth his hypocrisy was of a far higher and rarer sort than the hypocrisy which had flourished in Barebone's Parliament. For the consummate hypocrite is not he who conceals vice behind the semblance of virtue, but he who makes the vice which he has no objection to show a stalking horse to cover darker and more profitable vice which it is for his interest to hide. albot, raised by James to the earldom of Tyrconnel, had manded the troops in Ireland during the nine months ch elapsed between the termination of the viceroyalty of ond and the commencement of the viceroyalty of Claren CHAP. VI. When the new Lord Lieutenant was about to leave don for Dublin, the General was summoned from Dublin London. Dick Talbot had long been well known on the 1 which he had now to travel. Between Chester and the ital there was not an inn where he had not been in a wl. He was now more insolent and turbulent than ever. pressed horses in defiance of law, swore at the cooks and tilions, and almost raised mobs by his insolent rodomon.es. The Reformation, he told the people, had ruined rything. But fine times were coming. The Catholics uld soon be uppermost. The heretics should pay for all. ving and blaspheming incessantly, like a demoniac, he ne to the Court.* As soon as he was there, he allied himf closely with Castelmaine, Dover, and Albeville. These en called with one voice for war on the constitution of the urch and the State. They told their master that he owed to his religion and to the dignity of his crown to stand m against the outcry of heretical demagogues, and exrted him to let the Parliament see from the first that he ›uld be master in spite of opposition, and that the only 'ect of opposition would be to make him a hard master. Each of the two parties into which the Court was divided Feeling d zealous foreign allies. The ministers of Spain, of the of the mpire, and of the States General were now as anxious to of foreign pport Rochester as they had formerly been to support Hali- govern X. All the influence of Barillon was employed on the other de; and Barillon was assisted by another French agent, ferior to him in station, but superior in abilities, Bonrepaux. arillon was not without parts, and possessed in large meaire the graces and accomplishments which then distinguished e French gentry. But his capacity was scarcely equal to hat his great place required. He had become sluggish and elfindulgent, liked the pleasures of society and of the table etter than business, and on great emergencies generally aited for admonitions and even for reprimands from Ver Mémoires de Grammont; Life of Dec 29. 1685; Sheridan MS. among the dward, Earl of Clarendon; Correspon- the Stuart Papers; Ellis Correspondence, ence of Henry, Earl of Clarendon, Jan. 12. 1686. assim, particularly the letter dated ministers ments. |