ished
till he had been more than a century in his grave. So much is history
stranger than fiction; and so true is it that nature has caprices which
art dares not imitate. A dramatist would scarcely venture to bring on
the stage a grave prince, in the decline of life, ready to sacrifice his
crown in order to serve the interests of his religion, indefatigable in
making proselytes, and yet deserting and insulting a wife who had youth
and beauty for the sake of a profligate paramour who had neither. Still
less, if possible, would a dramatist venture to introduce a statesman
stooping to the wicked and shameful part of a procurer, and calling in
his wife to aid him in that dishonourable office, yet, in his moments of
leisure, retiring to his closet, and there secretly pouring out his soul
to his God in penitent tears and devout ejaculations. [69]

The Treasurer soon found that, in using scandalous means for the purpose
of obtaining a laudable end, he had committed, not only a crime, but a
folly. The Queen was now his enemy. She affected, indeed, to listen with
civility while the Hydes excused their recent conduct as well as they
could; and she occasionally pretended to use her influence in their
favour: but she must have been more or less than woman if she had really
forgiven the conspiracy which had been formed against her dignity and
her domestic happiness by the family of her husband's first wife. The
Jesuits strongly represented to the King the danger which he had so
narrowly escaped. His reputation, they said, his peace, his soul, had
been put in peril by the machinations of his prime minister. The Nuncio,
who would gladly have counteracted the influence of the violent party,
and cooperated with the moderate members of the cabinet, could not
honestly or decently separate himself on this occasion from Father
Petre. James himself, when parted by the sea from the charms which had
so strongly fascinated him, could not but regard with resentment and
contempt those who had sought to govern him by means of his vices. What
had passed must have had the effect of raising his own Church in his
esteem, and of lowering the Church of England. The Jesuits, whom it
was the fashion to represent as the most unsafe of spiritual guides, as
sophists who refined away the whole system of evangelical morality, as
sycophants who owed their influence chiefly to the indulgence with which
they treated the sins of the great, had reclaimed him from a