Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/421

Rh same game there for his master, and who played the deeper game for himself of one day putting it under the protection of the French King. In going to these extremities, every man of sense and judgment among the Catholics, from the Pope to a porter, knew that the King was a mere bigoted fool, who would undo himself and the cause he sought to advance; but he was deaf to all reason, and, happily for England ever afterwards, went tumbling off his throne in his own blind way.

A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted blunderer little expected. He first found it out in the University of Cambridge. Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge; which attempt the University resisted, and defeated him. He then went back to his favorite Oxford. On the death of the President of Magdalen College, he commanded that there should be elected to succeed him, one, whose only recommendation was, that he was of the King's religion. The University plucked up courage at last and refused. The King substituted another man, and it still refused, resolving to stand by its own election of a. The dull tyrant, upon this punished Mr. Hough, and five and twenty more by causing them to be expelled and declared incapable of holding any church preferment; then he proceeded to what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what was, in fact, his last plunge head-foremost in his tumble off his throne.

He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious tests or penal laws, in order to let in the Catholics more easily; but the Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail. The King and Father Petre now resolved to have this read, on a certain Sunday, in all the churches, and to order it to be circulated for that purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace; and they resolved that the declaration should not be read, and that they would petition the King against it. The Archbishop himself wrote out the petition, and six bishops went into the King's bed-chamber the same night to present it, to his infinite astonishment. Next day was the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only read by