Mary of Modena, a
plan which as James was still without a male heir promised to secure the
succession, should a son be the result of the marriage, in a Catholic
line. But Charles was not yet inclined to play the part of a mere puppet
in other men's hands, and the projects of Shaftesbury were suddenly
interrupted by an unexpected act of vigour on the part of the king. The
Houses were prorogued in November, and the Chancellor was ordered to
deliver up the Seals.

[Sidenote: The Public Panic.]

"It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my sword," Shaftesbury
is said to have replied to the royal bidding; and though the words were
innocent enough, for the sword was part of the usual dress of a
gentleman which he must necessarily resume when he laid aside the gown
of the Chancellor, they were taken as conveying a covert threat. He was
still determined to force on the king a peace with the States. But he
looked forward to the dangers of the future with even greater anxiety
than to those of the present. The Duke of York, the successor to the
throne, had owned himself a Catholic; and almost every one agreed that
securities for the national religion would be necessary in the case of
his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it is his especial merit that he
did see, that with a king like James, convinced of his Divine Right and
bigoted in his religious fervour, securities were valueless. From the
first he determined to force on Charles his brother's exclusion from the
throne, and his resolve was justified by the Revolution, which finally
did the work he proposed to do. Unhappily he was equally determined to
fight Charles with weapons as vile as his own. The result of Clifford's
resignation, of James's acknowledgement of his conversion, had been to
destroy all belief in the honesty of public men. A panic of distrust had
begun. The fatal truth was whispered that Charles himself was a
Catholic. In spite of the Test Act it was suspected that men Catholics
in heart still held high office in the State, and we know that in
Arlington's case the suspicion was just. Shaftesbury seized on this
public alarm, stirred above all by a sense of inability to meet the
secret dangers which day after day was disclosing, as the means of
carrying out his plans. He began fanning the panic by tales of a Papist
rising in London and of a coming Irish revolt with a French army to back
it. He retired to his house in the City to find security against a