endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants about him. He
held private interviews, which he called ‘closetings,’ with those
Members of Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to consent
to the design he had in view. When they did not consent, they were
removed, or resigned of themselves, and their places were given to
Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers from the army, by
every means in his power, and got Catholics into their places too.
He tried the same thing with the corporations, and also (though not
so successfully) with the Lord Lieutenants of counties. To terrify
the people into the endurance of all these measures, he kept an
army of fifteen thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath, where mass
was openly performed in the General’s tent, and where priests went
among the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to become
Catholics. For circulating a paper among those men advising them
to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman, named
JOHNSON, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actually
sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually
whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He dismissed his own brother-inlaw
from his Council because he was a Protestant, and made a Privy
Councillor of the before-mentioned Father Petre. He handed Ireland
over to RICHARD TALBOT, EARL OF TYRCONNELL, a worthless, dissolute
knave, who played the 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 favourite Oxford. On the death of the President
of Magdalen College, he commanded that there should be elected to
succeed him, one MR. ANTHONY FARMER, 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
MR. HOUGH. 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
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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 bedchamber 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 two
hundred clergymen out of ten thousand. The King resolved against
all advice to prosecute the bishops in the Court of King’s Bench,
and within three weeks they were summoned before the Privy Council,
and committed to the Tower. As the six bishops were taken to that
dismal place, by water, the people who were assembled in immense