JAMES THE SECOND.

easy to procure the attendance of some eminent persons whoseattachment to the Princesses and to the established religionwas unquestionable.

At a later period, when he had paid dearly for his fool-hardy contempt of public opinion, it was the fashion at SaintGermains to excuse him by throwing the blame on others.Some Jacobites charged Anne with having purposely kept outof the way. Nay, they were not ashamed to say that San crofthad provoked the King to send him to the Tower, in orderthat the evidence which was to confound the calumnies of themalecontents might be defective.* The absurdity of theseimputations is palpable. Could Anne or Sancroft possiblyhave foreseen that the Queen’s calculations would turn out tobe erroneous by a whole month? Had those calculations beencorrect, Anne would have been back from Bath, and Sancroftwould have been out of the Tower, in ample time for thebirth. At all events the maternal uncles of the King’sdaughters were neither at a distance nor in a prison. Thesame messenger who summoned the whole bevy of renegades,Dover, Peterborough, Murray, Sunderland, andMulgrave,could just as easily have summoned Clarendon. If they werePrivy Councillors, so was he. His house was in JermynStreet, not two hundred yards from the chamber of the Queen.Yet he was left to learn at St. James’s Church, from the agi-tation and whispers of the congregation, that his niece hadceased to be heiress presumptive of the crown.** Was it adisqualification that he was the near kinsman of the Princessesof Orange and Denmark? Or was it a disqualification that hewas unalterably attached to the Church of England?

The cry of the whole nation was that an imposture hadbeen practised. Papists had, during some months, beenpredicting, from the pulpit and through the press, in proseand verse, in English and Latin, that a Prince of Waleswould be given to the prayers of the Church; and they hadnow accomplished their own prophecy. Every witness whocould not be corrupted or deceived had been studiously ex-

* Clarke's Life of James the Second, ii. 159, ICO.

*' Clarendon’s Diary, June 10, 1 C 8 S.