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HISTOEY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

VII.

1687 .

Nonconformists he might flatter himself that he was secureagainst all chance of rebellion. According to the Anglicandivines, no subject could by any provocation be justified inwithstanding the Lord’s anointed by force. The theory ofthe Puritan sectaries was very different. Those sectaries hadno scruple about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon.Many of them did not shrink from using the dagger of Ehud.They were probably even now meditating another Westerninsurrection, or another Rye House Plot. James, therefore,conceived that he might safely persecute the Church if hecould only gain the Dissenters. The party whose principlesafforded him no guarantee would be attached to him by in-terest. The party whose interests he attacked would berestrained from insurrection by principle.

Influenced by such considerations as these, James, fromthe time at which he parted in anger with his Parliament,began to meditate a general league of all Nonconformists,Catholic and Protestant, against the established religion. Soearly as Christmas 1685, the agents of the United Provincesinformed the States General that the plan of a general tolera-tion had been arranged and would soon be disclosed.* Thereports which had reached the Dutch embassy proved to bepremature. The separatists appear, however, to have beentreated with more lenity during the year 16S6 than during theyear 1685. But it was only by slow degrees and after manystruggles that the King could prevail on himself to form analliance with all that he most abhorred. He had to overcomean animosity, not slight or capricious, not of recent origin orhasty growth, but hereditary in his line, strengthened bygreat wrongs inflicted and suffered through a hundred andtwenty eventful years, and intertwined with all his feelings,religious, political, domestic, and personal. Four genera-tions of Stuarts had waged a war to the death with four gene-rations of Puritans; and, through that long war, there hadbeen no Stuart who had hated the Puritans so much, or whohad been so much hated by them, as himself. They had

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