JAMES THE SECOND.

41

tried to blast his honour and to exclude him from his birth- ™-| p -right; they had called him incendiary, cut-throat, poisoner; lc87 _ 1they had driven him from the Admiralty and the PrivyCouncil; they had repeatedly chased him into banishment;they had plotted his assassination; they had risen against himin arms by thousands. He had avenged himself on them byhavoc such as England had never before seen. Their headsand quarters were still rotting on poles in all the marketplaces of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire. Aged women heldin high honour among the sectaries for piety and charity had,for offences which no good prince would have thought de-serving even of a severe reprimand, been beheaded andburned alive. Such had been, even in England, the relationsbetween the King and the Puritans; and in Scotland the ty-ranny of the King and the fury of the Puritans had been suchas Englishmen could hardly conceive. To forget an enmityso long and so deadly was no light task for a nature singularlyharsh and implacable.

The conflict in the royal mind did not escape the eye ofBarillon. At the end of January, 1087, he sent a remarkableletter to Versailles. The King, — such was the substance ofthis document, — had almost convinced himself that he couldnot obtain entire liberty for Roman Catholics and yet maintainthe laws against Protestant Dissenters. He leaned, there-fore, to the plan of a general indulgence; but at heart hewould be far better pleased if he could, even now, divide hisprotection and favour between the Church of Rome and theChurch of England, to the exclusion of all other religiouspersuasions.*

A very few days after this despatch had been written, t p 0 “^ a a t ' lonJames made his first hesitating and ungracious advances to-granted inwards the Puritans. He had determined to begin with Scot- Scoll ‘ m ' Lland, where his power to dispense with acts of parliamenthad been admitted by the obsequious Estates. On the twelfth

* Barillon, F “ b ' 1(| [ lGSJ. “Je crois que, dans le fond, si on nopouvoit laisser que la religion Anglicane et la Calholique dtablies parles loix, le Roy d’Anglelerre en seroit bien plus content.”