JAMES TIIE SECOND.

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greater revenue than any of his predecessors had ever pos- CI j£ p -sessed, and regularly allowed to her younger sister forty 1688 ,thousand pounds a year:* but the heiress presumptive of histhrone had never received , from him the smallest pecuniaryassistance, and was scarcely able to make that appearancewhich became her high rank among European princesses. Shehad ventured to intercede with him on behalf of her old friendand preceptor Compton, who, for refusing to commit an actof flagitious injustice, had been suspended from his episcopalfunctions; but she had been ungraciously repulsed.** Fromthe day on which it had become clear that she and her hus-band were determined not to be parties to the subversion ofthe English constitution, one chief object of the politics ofJames had been to injure them both. He had recalled theBritish regiments from Holland. Ho had conspired withTyrconnel and with France against Mary’s rights, and hadmade arrangements for depriving her of one at least of thethree crowns to which, at his death, she would have beenentitled. It was now believed by the great body of his people,and by many persons high in rank and distinguished by abili-ties, that he had introduced a supposititious Prince of Walesinto the royal family, in order to deprive her of a magnificentinheritance; and there is no reason to doubt that she partookof the prevailing suspicion. That she should love such afather was impossible. Her religious principles, indeed,were so strict that she would probably have tried to performwhat she considered as her duty, even to a father whom shedid not love. On the present occasion, however, she judgedthat the claim of James to her obedience ought to yield to aclaim more sacred. And indeed all divines and publicistsagree in this, that, when the daughter of a prince of onecountry is married to a prince of another country, she isbound to forget her own people and her father’s house, and,in the event of a rupture between her husband and herparents, to side with her husband. This is the undoubtedrule even when the husband is in the wrong; and to Mary the

* Bonrepaux, July {{. 1C8T.

** Birch’s Extracts, in the British Museum.