cted by affinity, by similarity of opinions, and by similarity of
temper, with the Treasurer of England. Both were Tories: both were men
of hot temper and strong prejudices; both were ready to support their
master in any attack on the civil liberties of his people; but both
were sincerely attached to the Established Church. Queensberry had early
notified to the court that, if any innovation affecting that Church were
contemplated, to such innovation he could be no party. But among his
colleagues were several men not less unprincipled than Sunderland. In
truth the Council chamber at Edinburgh had been, during a quarter of
a century, a seminary of all public and private vices; and some of
the politicians whose character had been formed there had a peculiar
hardness of heart and forehead to which Westminster, even in that bad
age, could hardly show anything quite equal. The Chancellor, James
Drummond, Earl of Perth, and his brother, the Secretary of State, John
Lord Melfort, were bent on supplanting Queensberry. The Chancellor had
already an unquestionable title to the royal favour. He had brought into
use a little steel thumbscrew which gave such exquisite torment that it
had wrung confessions even out of men on whom His Majesty's favourite
boot had been tried in vain. [124] But it was well known that even
barbarity was not so sure a way to the heart of James as apostasy. To
apostasy, therefore, Perth and Melfort resorted with a certain audacious
baseness which no English statesman could hope to emulate. They declared
that the papers found in the strong box of Charles the Second had
converted them both to the true faith; and they began to confess and to
hear mass. [125] How little conscience had to do with Perth's change of
religion he amply proved by taking to wife, a few weeks later, in direct
defiance of the laws of the Church which he had just joined, a lady who
was his cousin german, without waiting for a dispensation. When the good
Pope learned this, he said, with scorn and indignation which well became
him, that this was a strange sort of conversion. [126] But James was
more easily satisfied. The apostates presented themselves at Whitehall,
and there received such assurances of his favour, that they ventured to
bring direct charges against the Treasurer. Those charges, however,
were so evidently frivolous that James was forced to acquit the accused
minister; and many thought that the Chancellor had ruined himself by h