which he would be regarded abroad by triumphs over law and public opinion at home.

It seemed, indeed, that it would not be easy for him to demand more than the Commons were disposed to give. Already they had abundantly proved that they were de sirous to maintain his prerogatives unimpaired, and that they were by no means extreme to mark his encroachments on the rights of the people. Indeed, eleven twelfths of the members were either dependents of the court or zealous Cavaliers from the country. There were few things which such an assembly could pertinaciously refuse to the sovereign; and, happily for the nation, those few things were the very things on which James had set his heart.

One of his objects was to obtain a repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act, which he hated, as it was natural that a tyrant should hate the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny. This feeling remained deeply fixed in his mind to the last, and appears in the instructions which he drew up, when in exile, for the guidance of his son. But the Habeas Corpus Act, though passed during the ascendency of the Whigs, was not more dear to the Whigs than to the Tories. It is, indeed, not wonderful that this great law should be highly prized by all Englishmen without distinction of party; for it is a law which, not by circuitous, but by direct operation, adds to the security and happiness of every inhabitant of the realm.†

James had yet another design, odious to the great party which had set him on the throne and which had upheld. him there. He wished to form a great standing army. He had taken advantage of the late insurrection to make large additions to the military force which his brother had left. The bodies now designated as the first six regi

Instructions headed "For my son the Prince of Wales, 1692," in the Stuart Papers.

"The Habeas Corpus," said Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories, to Boswell," is the single advantage which our government has over that of other countries."

ments of Dragoon Guards, the third and fourth regiments of Dragoons, and the nine regiments of infantry of the line, from the seventh to the fifteenth inclusive, had just been raised.* The effect of these augmentations, and of the recall of the garrison of Tangier, was, that the number of regular troops in England had, in a few months, been increased from six thousand to near twenty thousand. No English king had ever, in time of peace, had such a force at his command; yet even with this force James was not content. He often repeated that no confidence could be placed in the fidelity of the train-bands; that they sympathized with all the passions of the class to which they belonged; that at Sedgemoor there had been more militia-men in the rebel army than in the royal encampment, and that, if the throne had been defended only by the array of the counties, Monmouth would have marched in triumph from Lyme to London.

The revenue, large as it was when compared with that of former kings, barely sufficed to meet this new charge. A great part of the produce of the new taxes was absorbed by the naval charge. At the close of the late reign, the whole cost of the army, the Tangier regiments included, had been under three hundred thousand pounds a year. Six hundred thousand pounds a year would not now suffice. If any further augmentation were made, it would be necessary to demand a supply from Parliament; and it was not likely that Parliament would be in a complying mood. The very name of standing army was hateful to the whole nation, and to no part of the nation more hateful than to the Cavalier gentlemen who filled the Lower House. In their minds, a standing army was inseparably associated with the Rump, with the Protector, with

* See the Historical Records of Regiments, published under the supervision of the Adjutant General.

"C'est un

+ Barillon, Dec., 1685. He had studied the subject much. détail," he says, "dont j'ai connoissance." It appears from the Treasury Warrant Book that the charge of the army for the year 1687 was fixed on the first of January at £623,104 9s. 11d.

the spoliation of the Church, with the purgation of the Universities, with the abolition of the peerage, with the murder of the king, with the sullen reign of the Saints, with cant and asceticism, with fines and sequestrations, with the insults which major generals, sprung from the dregs of the people, had offered to the oldest and most honorable families of the kingdom. There was, moreover, scarcely a baronet or a squire in the Parliament who did not owe part of his importance in his own county to his rank in the militia. If that national force were set aside, the gentry of England must lose much of their dignity and influence. It was therefore probable that the king would find it more difficult to obtain funds for the support of his army than even to obtain the repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act.

But both the designs which have been mentioned were subordinate to one great design on which the king's whole soul was bent, but which was abhorred by the Tory gentlemen who were ready to shed their blood for his rights; abhorred by that Church which had never, during three generations of civil discord, wavered in fidelity to his house; abhorred even by that army on which, in the last extremity, he must rely.

His religion was still under proscription. Many rigorous laws against Roman Catholics appeared on the Statute Book, and had, within no long time, been rigorously executed. The Test Act excluded from civil and military office all who dissented from the Church of England; and, by a subsequent act, passed when the fictions of Oates had driven the nation wild, it had been provided that no person should sit in either house of Parliament without solemnly abjuring the doctrine of transubstantiation. That the king should wish to obtain for the Church to which he belonged a complete toleration, was natural and right; nor is there any reason to doubt that, by a little patience, prudence, and justice, such a toleration might have been obtained.

The extreme antipathy and dread with which the En

glish people regarded his religion was not to be ascribed solely or chiefly to theological animosity. That salvation might be found in the Church of Rome-nay, that some members of that Church had been among the brightest examples of Christian virtue, was admitted by all divines of the Anglican communion and by the most illustrious Nonconformists. It is notorious that the penal laws against popery were strenuously defended by many who thought Arianism, Quakerism, and Judaism more dangerous, in a spiritual point of view, than popery, and who yet showed no disposition to enact similar laws against Arians, Quakers, or Jews.

It is easy to explain why the Roman Catholic was treated with less indulgence than was shown to men who renounced the doctrine of the Nicene fathers, and even to men who had not been admitted by baptism within the Christian pale. There was among the English a strong conviction that the Roman Catholic, where the interests of his religion were concerned, thought himself free from all the ordinary rules of morality; nay, that he thought it meritorious to violate those rules, if, by so doing, he could avert injury or scandal from the Church of which he was a member. Nor was this opinion destitute of a show of reason. It was impossible to deny that Roman Catholic casuists of great eminence had written in defense of equivocation, of mental reservation, of perjury, and even of assassination. Nor, it was said, had the speculations of this odious school of sophists been barren of results. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the murder of the first William of Orange, the murder of Henry the Third of France, the numerous conspiracies which had been formed against the life of Elizabeth, and, above all, the gunpowder treason, were constantly cited as instances of the close connection between vicious theory and vicious practice. It was alleged that every one of these crimes had been prompted or applauded by Roman Catholic divines. The letters which Everard Digby wrote in lemon-juice from the Tower to his wife had recently been published and

were often quoted. He was a scholar and a gentleman, upright in all ordinary dealings, and strongly impressed with a sense of duty to God; yet he had been deeply concerned in the plot for blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, and had, on the brink of eternity, declared that it was incomprehensible to him how any Roman Catholic should think such a design sinful. The inference popularly drawn from these things was, that however fair the general character of a papist might be, there was no excess of fraud or cruelty of which he was not capable when the safety and honor of his Church were at stake.

The extraordinary success of the fables of Oates is to be chiefly ascribed to the prevalence of this opinion. It was to no purpose that the accused Roman Catholic appealed to the integrity, humanity, and loyalty which he had shown through the whole course of his life. It was to no purpose that he called crowds of respectable witnesses, of his own persuasion, to contradict monstrous romances invented by the most infamous of mankind. It was to no purpose that, with the halter round his neck, he invoked on himself the whole vengeance of the God before whom, in a few moments, he must appear, if he had been guilty of meditating any ill to his prince or to his Protestant fellow-countrymen. The evidence which he produced in his favor proved only how little popish oaths were worth. His very virtues raised a presumption of his guilt. That he had before him death and judgment in immediate prospect only made it more likely that he would deny what, without injury to the holiest of causes, he could not confess. Among the unhappy men who were convicted of the murder of Godfrey was one Protestant of no high character, Henry Berry. It is a remarkable and well-attested circumstance that Berry's last words did more to shake the credit of the plot than the dying declarations of all the pious and honorable Roman Catholics who underwent the same fate.*

It was not only by the ignorant populace, it was not. Burnet, i., 447.