388

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

VI.

1686 .

Dismis-sion ofClaren-don.

Tyr-

connel

Lord

Deputy.

that tribunal which had been illegally created for the purposeof persecuting her. To save his place he had given a dis-honest vote for degrading one of her most eminent ministers,had affected to doubt her orthodoxy, had listened with theoutward show of docility to teachers who called her scliisma-tical and heretical, and had offered to cooperate strenuouslywith her deadliest enemies in their designs against her. Thehighest praise to which he was entitled was this, that he hadshrunk from the exceeding wickedness and baseness of pub-licly abjuring, for lucre, the religion in which he had beenbrought up, which he believed to be true, and of which hehad long made an ostentatious profession. Yet he was ex-tolled by the great body of Churchmen as if he had been thebravest and purest of martyrs. The Old and New Testa-ments, the Martyrologies of Eusebius and of Fox, wereransacked to find parallels for his heroic piety. He was Danielin the den of lions, Sliadrach in the fiery furnace, Peter inthe dungeon of Herod, Paul at the bar of Nero, Ignatius inthe amphitheatre, Latimer at the stake. Among the manyfacts which prove that the standard of honour and virtueamong the public men of that age was low, the admirationexcited by Rochester's constancy is , perhaps , the mostdecisive.

In his fall he dragged down Clarendon. On the seventhof January 1687, the Gazette announced to the people of Lon-don that the Treasury was put into commission. On theeighth arrived at Dublin a despatch formally signifying that ina month Tyrconnel would assume the government of Ireland.It was not without great difficulty that this man had sur-mounted the numerous impediments which stood in the wayof his ambition. It was well known that the exterminationof the English colony in Ireland was the object on which hisheart was set. He had, therefore, to overcome some scruplesin the royal mind. He had to surmount the opposition, not