numbers fell upon their knees, and wept for them, and prayed for
them. When they got to the Tower, the officers and soldiers on
guard besought them for their blessing. While they were confined
there, the soldiers every day drank to their release with loud
shouts. When they were brought up to the Court of King’s Bench for
their trial, which the Attorney-General said was for the high
offence of censuring the Government, and giving their opinion about
affairs of state, they were attended by similar multitudes, and
surrounded by a throng of noblemen and gentlemen. When the jury
went out at seven o’clock at night to consider of their verdict,
everybody (except the King) knew that they would rather starve than
yield to the King’s brewer, who was one of them, and wanted a
verdict for his customer. When they came into court next morning,
after resisting the brewer all night, and gave a verdict of not
guilty, such a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had never
heard before; and it was passed on among the people away to Temple
Bar, and away again to the Tower. It did not pass only to the
east, but passed to the west too, until it reached the camp at
Hounslow, where the fifteen thousand soldiers took it up and echoed
it. And still, when the dull King, who was then with Lord
Feversham, heard the mighty roar, asked in alarm what it was, and
was told that it was ‘nothing but the acquittal of the bishops,’ he
said, in his dogged way, ‘Call you that nothing? It is so much the
worse for them.’
Between the petition and the trial, the Queen had given birth to a
son, which Father Petre rather thought was owing to Saint Winifred.
But I doubt if Saint Winifred had much to do with it as the King’s
friend, inasmuch as the entirely new prospect of a Catholic
successor (for both the King’s daughters were Protestants)
determined the EARLS OF SHREWSBURY, DANBY, and DEVONSHIRE, LORD
LUMLEY, the BISHOP OF LONDON, ADMIRAL RUSSELL, and COLONEL SIDNEY,
to invite the Prince of Orange over to England. The Royal Mole,
seeing his danger at last, made, in his fright, many great
concessions, besides raising an army of forty thousand men; but the
Prince of Orange was not a man for James the Second to cope with.
His preparations were extraordinarily vigorous, and his mind was
resolved.
For a fortnight after the Prince was ready to sail for England, a
great wind from the west prevented the departure of his fleet.
Even when the wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed by a
storm, and was obliged to put back to refit. At last, on the first
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of November, one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, the
Protestant east wind, as it was long called, began to blow; and on
the third, the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet
twenty miles long sailing gallantly by, between the two places. On
Monday, the fifth, it anchored at Torbay in Devonshire, and the
Prince, with a splendid retinue of officers and men, marched into
Exeter. But the people in that western part of the country had
suffered so much in The Bloody Assize, that they had lost heart.
Few people joined him; and he began to think of returning, and
publishing the invitation he had received from those lords, as his
justification for having come at all. At this crisis, some of the
gentry joined him; the Royal army began to falter; an engagement
was signed, by which all who set their hand to it declared that
they would support one another in defence of the laws and liberties
of the three Kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, and of the
Prince of Orange. From that time, the cause received no check; the
greatest towns in England began, one after another, to declare for
the Prince; and he knew that it was all safe with him when the
University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate, if he wanted
any money.
By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, touching