to be educated under her eyes
for the first ten years of their life, for this seemed the natural
privilege of a mother: but the presumption that the children might
become Catholics involved wide consequences. It was stipulated that
the laws against Catholics should not apply to such children, nor
prejudice their succession. Still more displeasing however were some
other articles of general import, which were carefully kept back from
the knowledge of the public. They amounted to this:--that the laws
against the Catholics should no longer be carried into execution, and
that the Councillors of the sovereign should be pledged by an oath to
abstain from enforcing them.[422] The King met with some opposition to
these articles in the Privy Council. But he said that the question was
not whether they were advisable, but whether they were not necessary
at a time when part of the domain under dispute, and the Prince
himself, were in the hands of the Spaniards. And moreover they did not
amount to a complete concession to the wishes of the Catholics, for
they spoke only of tolerating their worship in private, not in public:
the articles were in harmony with the old ideas of the King. James
solemnly swore to the first articles, on July 20, in the presence of
the Spanish ambassador; and immediately after him the members of the
Council took the same oath. The King alone then pledged himself to
carry out the second set of articles.

An extensive alteration had already taken place in the treatment of
the Catholics. Priests and recusants had been discharged from prison
and enjoyed full liberty. An injunction was issued to the preachers
and to the Universities to abstain from all invectives against the
Papacy. Men had to see individual preachers who transgressed these
orders thrown into prisons which had been just emptied. The families
which openly expressed their hitherto secret adherence to Catholicism
were already counted by hundreds. Then came these transactions. What
was learnt of the articles was enough to spread universal dismay
among the Protestants, but they expected yet worse things. They
thought they saw a pronounced Catholic tendency becoming ascendant in
the conduct of affairs. An universal danger seemed to be hanging over
the religion which they professed. Every one hastened to church to
pray against it; the churches had never been more crowded. The second
ecclesiastic in the country, the Archbishop of York, put the King in