he parliament in which they had had the superiority, was the
only one omitted in them. The fact appears to have been the very reverse
of what such historians suppose, and that the activity of the late
parliamentary leaders, in prosecuting the popish plot, was the principal
circumstance which reconciled the nation, for a time, to their other
proceedings; that their conduct in that business (now so justly
condemned) was the grand engine of their power, and that when that
failed, they were soon overpowered by the united forces of bigotry and
corruption. They were hated by a great part of the nation, not for their
crimes, but for their virtues. To be above corruption is always odious
to the corrupt, and to entertain more enlarged and juster notions of
philosophy and government, is often a cause of alarm to the narrow-minded
and superstitious. In those days particularly it was obvious to refer to
the confusion, greatly exaggerated of the times of the commonwealth; and
it was an excellent watchword of alarm, to accuse every lover of law and
liberty of designs to revive the tragical scene which had closed the life
of the first Charles. In this spirit, therefore, the Exclusion Bill, and
the alleged conspiracies of Sidney and Russell, were, as might naturally
be expected, the chief charges urged against the Whigs; but their conduct
on the subject of the popish plot was so far from being the cause of the
hatred born to them, that it was not even used as a topic of accusation
against them.

In order to keep up that spirit in the nation, which was thought to be
manifested in the addresses, his majesty ordered the declaration, to
which allusion was made in the last chapter, to be published, interwoven
with a history of the Rye House Plot, which is said to have been drawn by
Dr. Spratt, Bishop of Rochester. The principal drift of this publication
was, to load the memory of Sidney and Russell, and to blacken the
character of the Duke of Monmouth, by wickedly confounding the
consultations holden by them with the plot for assassinating the late
king, and in this object it seems in a great measure to have succeeded.
He also caused to be published an attestation of his brother's having
died a Roman Catholic, together with two papers, drawn up by him, in
favour of that persuasion. This is generally considered to have been a
very ill-advised instance of zeal; but probably James thought, that at a
time when people seemed to be so in lo