er able to oppress them.

This plan seemed to him to have one strong recommendation. If he could
only succeed in conciliating the Protestant Nonconformists he might
flatter himself that he was secure against all chance of rebellion.
According to the Anglican divines, no subject could by any provocation
be justified in withstanding the Lord's anointed by force. The theory of
the Puritan sectaries was very different. Those sectaries had no scruple
about smiting tyrants with the sword of Gideon. Many of them did not
shrink from using the dagger of Ehud. They were probably even now
meditating another Western insurrection, or another Rye House Plot.
James, therefore, conceived that he might safely persecute the Church if
he could only gain the Dissenters. The party whose principles afforded
him no guarantee would be attached to him by interest. The party
whose interests he attacked would be restrained from insurrection by
principle.

Influenced by such considerations as these, James, from the time at
which he parted in anger with his Parliament, began to meditate a
general league of all Nonconformists, Catholic and Protestant, against
the established religion. So early as Christmas 1685, the agents of the
United Provinces informed the States General that the plan of a general
toleration had been arranged and would soon be disclosed. [232] The
reports which had reached the Dutch embassy proved to be premature.
The separatists appear, however, to have been treated with more lenity
during the year 1686 than during the year 1685. But it was only by slow
degrees and after many struggles that the King could prevail on himself
to form an alliance with all that he most abhorred. He had to overcome
an animosity, not slight or capricious, not of recent origin or hasty
growth, but hereditary in his line, strengthened by great wrongs
inflicted and suffered through a hundred and twenty eventful years, and
intertwined with all his feelings, religious, political, domestic, and
personal. Four generations of Stuarts had waged a war to the death with
four generations of Puritans; and, through that long war, there had been
no Stuart who had hated the Puritans so much, or who had been so much
hated by them, as himself. They had tried to blast his honour and
to exclude him from his birthright; they had called him incendiary,
cutthroat, poisoner; they had driven him from the Admiralty and the
Privy Council; they had repeatedly chased him into ba