t he
owed the support of that great body of noblemen and gentlemen who fought
so long and so gallantly in his cause. But it would have been useless to
represent these things to James.

Another fatal delusion had taken possession of his mind, and was never
dispelled till it had ruined him. He firmly believed that, do what
he might, the members of the Church of England would act up to their
principles. It had, he knew, been proclaimed from ten thousand pulpits,
it had been solemnly declared by the University of Oxford, that even
tyranny as frightful as that of the most depraved of the Caesars did not
justify subjects in resisting the royal authority; and hence he was weak
enough to conclude that the whole body of Tory gentlemen and clergymen
would let him plunder, oppress, and insult them without lifting an
arm against him. It seems strange that any man should have passed his
fiftieth year without discovering that people sometimes do what they
think wrong: and James had only to look into his own heart for abundant
proof that even a strong sense of religious duty will not always prevent
frail human beings from indulging their passions in defiance of divine
laws, and at the risk of awful penalties. He must have been conscious
that, though he thought adultery sinful, he was an adulterer: but
nothing could convince him that any man who professed to think rebellion
sinful would ever, in any extremity, be a rebel. The Church of England
was, in his view, a passive victim, which he might, without danger,
outrage and torture at his pleasure; nor did he ever see his error till
the Universities were preparing to coin their plate for the purpose of
supplying the military chest of his enemies, and till a Bishop, long
renowned for loyalty, had thrown aside his cassock, girt on a sword, and
taken the command of a regiment of insurgents.

In these fatal follies the King was artfully encouraged by a minister
who had been an Exclusionist, and who still called himself a Protestant,
the Earl of Sunderland. The motives and conduct of this unprincipled
politician have often been misrepresented. He was, in his own lifetime,
accused by the Jacobites of having, even before the beginning of the
reign of James, determined to bring about a revolution in favour of
the Prince of Orange, and of having, with that view, recommended a
succession of outrages on the civil and ecclesiastical constitution of
the realm. This idle story has been repeated down