Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/546

532 and he had a number of them, were so excessively homely, that Charles used laughingly to say that his confessor must have prescribed them as penances for him. His chief mistress, in his first wife's lifetime, was Arabella Churchill, the plain sister of the after duke of Marlborough. His present wife, Mary of Modena, was young, handsome, and spirited, but these qualities had no attraction for James, who was now the abject slave of Catherine Sedley, the bold and clever but ugly daughter of the profligate wit and poet, Sir Charles Sedley. The homely but acute Sedley used to ridicule James's fancy for her and her uncomely sisters of his harem, saying, " We are none of us handsome, and it cannot be our wit that he likes us for, for if we had wit, he has not enough himself to find it out."

With the aid of the council of his catholic cabal, James now began in earnest to put down protestantism in this kingdom, and restore Romanism. As there was no hope of money from a parliament, he made his peace with the king of France, stooped his shoulder to the burden, and became once more a servant unto tribute. He abandoned all the best interests of England, apologised to Lotus for having received the Huguenots, and took measures to defeat the very subscription in their favour which he had commenced and recommended. He arrested John Claude, one of the refugees who had published an account of the persecutions of the Huguenots by Louis, and caused his book to be publicly burnt. Spite of this, and of his open discouragement, the subscription amounted to forty thousand pounds, but he took good care that the unfortunate Huguenots should never get the money, by ordering every one who applied for it to first take the sacrament according to the Anglican ritual, which he knew differed so much from their own mode, as to form an effectual bar, which it did. And this was the man who complained of the test act as a violation of conscience. He had himself dispensed with this act in open defiance of the law, but he now sought to obtain a sanction from the judges for the breach of the act. To parliament he dare not appeal; he therefore called on the twelve judges to declare that he possessed this dispensing power as part of his prerogative. The judges to a man refused; he dismissed them, and appointed more pliant ones. But the law officers of the crown were equally stubborn. Sawyer, the attorney-general, told the king that he dared not do it, for it was not to abolish a statute, but the whole statute law from the accession of Elizabeth. Sawyer was too useful to be dismissed, but Heneage Finch, the solicitor-general, was turned out, and Powis, a barrister of no mark, put in his place. A case was immediately tried in the court of King's Bench, to obtain the judges' sanction. Sir Edward Hales was formally prosecuted for holding a commission in the army, being a catholic; but the lord chief justice, Sir Edward Herbert, took the opinion of the new judges upon it, which was, that the king possessed the power to dispense with the act, and judgment was given accordingly. No sooner was James in possession of this decision of the King's Bench, than he appointed the four catholic lords of his secret cabal members of the privy council—namely, Arundel, Bellasis, Powis, and Dover.

Having perpetrated this daring act in the conned, James hastened to exercise the same power in the church. Encouraged by the known opinions and intentions of the king, several clergymen who had outwardly conformed to the church of England and held livings, now threw off the mask and proclaimed themselves of the catholic church, and applied to James to authorise them still to hold their livings. These were Obadiah Walker, master of University College, Oxford; Boyce, Dean, and Bernard, fellows of different colleges; and Edward Selater, curate of Putney and Esher. The king granted them dispensations to hold their livings, spite of their avowed conversion to the doctrines of another church, on the plea that he would not oppress their consciences. But to support men in holding livings in a church which, they had abandoned was so outrageous a violation of that church's conscience, that if was impossible long to be submitted to. James, in his very contracted mind, imagined that, because the bishops and ministers had so zealously advocated absolute submission to his will, they would practise it. How little could he have read human nature. Of these sudden converts, Selater and Walker as suddenly reconverted themselves at the revolution.

James having now his hand in, went on boldly He had permitted professed converts to Catholicism to retain their protestant livings, he next appointed a catholic to a church dignity. John Massey, a fellow of Merton, who had gone over to Rome, was, in violation of every local and national statute, appointed dean of Christchurch. Massey at once erected an altar and celebrated mass in the cathedral of Christchurch, and James told the pope's nuncio that the same should soon be the case in Cambridge. It remained now only to fill the sees of the church with catholic bishops as they fell vacant; and to enable him to do that, it was necessary, in the first place, to possess himself of a power in the church like that which he had assumed in the state. He must have a tribunal before which he could summon any refractory clergy, as he could now by his pliant judges control any appeal to the bench. He therefore determined to revive the Court of High Commission, that terrible engine of the Tudors and the Stuarts, which the Long Parliament had put down. This court had power not only to cite any clergyman before it who dared to preach or publish anything reflecting on the views or measures of the king, but "to correct, amend, and alter the statutes of the universities, churches, and schools," or where the statutes were bad to make new ones, and the powers of the commission were declared to be effectual for these purposes, "notwithstanding any law or statute to the contrary." In fact, all the old powers of the High Commission were revived, and the same device and motto were adopted on the seal.

This was a direct and during declaration of war on the church. The act of supremacy was thus turned against it, and every clergyman, professor, and schoolmaster, from the primate to the simple curate and tutor, were laid at the mercy of this insane tyrant. The alarm of the whole court and country, when this astounding fact was made known, was indescribable. The stanchest courtiers trembled at the temerity of the monarch: the French ministers and the Jesuits alone applauded. The new and terrible power of the