e author of a
book in which he pleaded for toleration on the ground that Catholics
should be as well treated in England as Protestants in France. With
great reluctance the pope consented that his agent, D'Adda, should be
appointed a nuncio; but when James made the Jesuit Petre a privy
councillor, giving him his own apartment at Whitehall, and represented
that he would be fitter for such a position if he was made a bishop or
a cardinal, Innocent refused.

Petre laid the blame on the nuncio, and the Jesuits asked that he
should be sent out of the country. He would be forced, said the king,
to do without the Court of Rome. D'Adda gave the same advice as the
Prince of Orange, that the Penal Laws should not be executed, but the
Test Acts retained; and he was one of those who, when the crisis came,
maintained that there was nothing to fear from William. After
Innocent's death in 1689 there was a change, but Rome declared in
favour of taking the oath to William III. Perth wrote from Rome in
1695: "The Prince of Orange has more friends here than either in
England or Holland, and the king is universally hated. It's scandalous
to hear what is said every day, publicly, when they make comparisons
betwixt an heretical, unnatural, usurping tyrant and His Majesty."

On this state of feeling, far stronger in 1688 than in 1695, William
built his plan. It was in the power of Lewis at any moment to prevent
the expedition. He had an army ready for war, and could have held
William fast by sending it against the Netherlands. He preferred to
attack the empire on the Upper Rhine. For twenty years it had been
his desire to neutralise England by internal broils, and he was glad
to have the Dutch out of the way while he dealt a blow at Leopold. It
was impossible that the conflict between James and William should not
yield him an opportunity. For the beginning he stood carefully aside,
letting things take their course. There was no resistance, by land or
sea, and it proved almost as easy to dethrone the Stuarts as it had
been to restore them. The balance of parties, the lack of energetic
conviction in England, had allowed things to settle down, when the
real struggle began, in Ireland, in Scotland, and in the Channel. The
Scots rising did not postpone the issue, but it is valuable to us for
the sake of one transaction.

The deed that was done in Glencoe is familiar to us all, by a patch
of Tyrian purple in the most splendid of ou