o November. [81] It
was not strange that the King did not wish to meet them: for he had
determined to adopt a policy which he knew to be, in the highest degree,
odious to them. From his predecessors he had inherited two prerogatives,
of which the limits had never been defined with strict accuracy, and
which, if exerted without any limit, would of themselves have sufficed
to overturn the whole polity of the State and of the Church. These were
the dispensing power and the ecclesiastical supremacy. By means of the
dispensing power the King purposed to admit Roman Catholics, not merely
to civil and military, but to spiritual, offices. By means of the
ecclesiastical supremacy he hoped to make the Anglican clergy his
instruments for the destruction of their own religion.

This scheme developed itself by degrees. It was not thought safe to
begin by granting to the whole Roman Catholic body a dispensation from
all statutes imposing penalties and tests. For nothing was more fully
established than that such a dispensation was illegal. The Cabal had,
in 1672, put forth a general Declaration of Indulgence. The Commons,
as soon as they met, had protested against it. Charles the Second had
ordered it to be cancelled in his presence, and had, both by his own
mouth and by a written message, assured the Houses that the step which
had caused so much complaint should never be drawn into precedent. It
would have been difficult to find in all the Inns of Court a barrister
of reputation to argue in defence of a prerogative which the Sovereign,
seated on his throne in full Parliament, had solemnly renounced a few
years before. But it was not quite so clear that the King might not,
on special grounds, grant exemptions to individuals by name. The first
object of James, therefore, was to obtain from the courts of common
law an acknowledgment that, to this extent at least, he possessed the
dispensing power.

But, though his pretensions were moderate when compared with those which
he put forth a few months later, he soon found that he had against him
almost the whole sense of Westminster Hall. Four of the Judges gave him
to understand that they could not, on this occasion, serve his purpose;
and it is remarkable that all the four were violent Tories, and that
among them were men who had accompanied Jeffreys on the Bloody Circuit,
and who had consented to the death of Cornish and of Elizabeth Gaunt.
Jones, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, a