ciples of the Whig. It was indeed in the power of the king, by the exercise of his prerogative of mercy, to suspend the operation of the penal laws. It might hereafter be in his power, by discreet management, to obtain from the Parliament a repeal of the acts which imposed civil disabilities on those who professed his religion; but if he attempted to subdue the Protestant feeling of England by rude means, it was easy to see that the violent compression of so powerful and elastic a spring would be followed by as violent a recoil. The Roman Catholic peers, by prematurely attempting to force their way into the Privy Council and the House of Lords, might lose their mansions and their ample estates, and might end their lives as traitors on Tower Hill, or as beggars at the porches of Italian convents.

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 to have been prime minister if the Popish Plot had succeeded. John Lord Bellasyse took the same view of the state of affairs. In his youth he had fought gallantly for Charles the First, had been rewarded after the Restoration with high honors and commands, and had quitted them when the Test Act was passed. With these distinguished leaders all the noblest and most opulent members of their Church concurred, except Lord Arundell of Wardour, an old man fast sinking into second childhood.

But there was at the court a small knot of Roman Catholics whose hearts had been ulcerated by old injuries, whose heads had been turned by recent elevation, who were impatient to climb to the highest honors of the state, and who, having little to lose, were not troubled by thoughts of the day of reckoning. One of these was Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine in Ireland, and husband of the Duchess of Cleveland. His title had notoriously been purchased by his wife's dishonor 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 Castlemaine was allied one of the most favored 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 intriguing, pushing Irishman named White, who had been much abroad, who had served the house of Austria as something between an envoy and a spy, and who had been rewarded for his services with the title of Marquess of Albeville.‡

Soon after the prorogation this reckless faction was strengthened by an important re-enforcement. Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnel, the fiercest and most uncompromising of all those who hated the liberties and religion of England, arrived at court from Dublin.

Talbot was descended from an old Norman family which had been long settled in Leinster, which had there sunk into degeneracy, which had adopted the manners of the Celts, which had, like the Celts, adhered to the old religion, and which had taken part with the Celts in the rebellion of 1641. In his youth he had been one of the most noted sharpers and bullies of London. He had been introduced to Charles and James when they were exiles in Flanders, as a man fit and ready for the infamous serv

See his trial in the Collection of State Trials, and his curious manifesto, printed in 1681.

Mémoires de Grammont; Pepys's Diary, Aug. 19, 1662; Bonrepaux to Seignelay, Feb., 1686.

Bonrepaux to Seignelay, Feb., 1686.

ice of assassinating the Protector. Soon after the Restoration, Talbot attempted to obtain the favor of the royal family by a service more infamous still. A plea was wanted which might justify the Duke of York in breaking that promise of marriage by which he had obtained from Anne Hyde the last proof of female affection. Such a plea Talbot, in concert with some of his dissolute companions, undertook to furnish. He affirmed that he had triumphed over the young lady's virtue, made up a long romance about the interviews with which she had indulged him, and related how, in one of his secret visits to her, he had unluckily overturned 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 without a blush. The injured lady became Duchess of York. Had her husband been a man really upright and honorable, he 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 a desire to gain his favor, ever seemed to him deserving of 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 pander to her husband. In no long time Whitehall 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 honor. It was in vain that old and discreet counselors 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 dice-box 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; but advancing age 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 cold-hearted, 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 Barebones'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 Ivice which it is for his interest to hide.

Talbot, raised by James to the earldom of Tyrconnel, had commanded the troops in Ireland during the nine months which elapsed between the death of Charles and the commencement of the viceroyalty of Clarendon. When the new lord lieutenant was about to leave London for Dublin, the general was summoned from Dublin to London. Dick Talbot had long been well known on the road which he now had to travel. Between Chester and the

capital there was not an inn where he had not been in a brawl. Wherever he came he pressed horses in defiance of law, swore at the cooks and postillions, and almost raised mobs by his insolent rodomontades. The Reformation, he told the people, had ruined every thing. But fine times

were coming. The Catholics would soon be uppermost. The heretics should pay for all. Raving and blaspheming incessantly, like a demoniac, he came to the court.* As soon as he was there, he allied himself closely with Castlemaine, Dover, and Albeville. These men called with one voice for war on the constitution of the Church and the State. They told their master that he owed it to his religion and to the dignity of his crown to stand firm against the outcry of heretical demagogues, and to let the Parliament see from the first that he would be master in spite of opposition, and that the only effect of opposition would be to make him a hard master.

Each of the two parties into which the court was divided had zealous foreign allies. The ministers of Spain, of the Empire, and of the States-General were now as anxious to support Rochester as they had formerly been to support Halifax. All the influence of Barillon was employed on the other side; and Barillon was assisted by another French agent, inferior to him in station, but far superior in abilities, Bonrepaux. Barillon was not without parts, and possessed in large measure the graces and accomplishments which then distinguished the French gentry. But his abilities were scarcely equal to what his great place required. He had become sluggish and selfindulgent, liked the pleasures of society and of the table better than business, and on great emergencies generally waited for admonitions and even for reprimands from Versailles before he showed much activity.† Bonrepaux had

* Mémoires de Grammont; Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon; Correspondence of Henry, Earl of Clarendon, passim, particularly the letter dated Dec. 29, 1685; Sheridan MS., among the Stuart Papers; Ellis Correspondence, Jan, 12, 1686.

† See his later correspondence, passim. St. Evremond, passim; Madame