WILLIAM AND MART.

199

They could no more pretend to merit before him than beforeGod. When they had done all, they were still unprofitable ■servants. The highest praise due to the royalist who shed hisblood on the field of battle or on the scaffold for hereditarymonarchy was simply that he was not a traitor. After all thesevere discipline which the deposed King had undergone, hewas still as much bent on plundering and abasing the Church ofEngland as on the day when he told the kneeling fellows ofMagdalene to get out of his sight, or on the day when he sentthe Bishops to the Tower. He was in the habit of declaring thathe would rather die without seeing England again than stoop tocapitulate with those whom he ought to command.* In the De-claration of April 1692 the whole man appears without disguise,full of his own imaginary rights, unable to understand how anybody but himself can have any rights, dull, obstinate and cruel.Another paper which he drew' up about the same time shows, ifpossible, still more clearly, how little he had profited by a sharpexperience. In that paper he set forth the plan according towhich he intended to govern when he should be restored. Helaid it down as a rule that one Commissioner of the Treasury,one of the two Secretaries of State, the Secretary at "War, themajority of the Great Officers of the Household, the majorityof the Lords of the Bedchamber, the majority of the officers ofthe army, should ahvays be Roman Catholics.**

It was to no purpose that the most eminent Compounderssent from London letter after letter filled with judicious counseland earnest supplication. It was to no purpose that they de-monstrated in the plainest manner the impossibility of establish-ing Popish ascendency in a country whore at least forty ninefiftieths of thepopulation and muchmore than forty nine fiftieths

* A short and true Relation of Intrigues, 1694.

** See tile paper headed “For my Son the Prince of Wales , 1092.” It isprinted at the end of the Life of James.

CHAP.

XX.

1693 .