s, must be abandoned. Nothing remained
but to try a coalition between the Church of Rome and the Puritan sects
against the Church of England.

On the eighteenth of March the King informed the Privy Council that he
had determined to prorogue the Parliament till the end of November, and
to grant, by his own authority, entire liberty of conscience to all
his subjects. [238] On the fourth of April appeared the memorable
Declaration of Indulgence.

In this Declaration the King avowed that it was his earnest wish to see
his people members of that Church to which he himself belonged. But,
since that could not be, he announced his intention to protect them
in the free exercise of their religion. He repeated all those phrases
which, eight years before, when he was himself an oppressed man, had
been familiar to his lips, but which he had ceased to use from the day
on which a turn of fortune had put it into his power to be an oppressor.
He had long been convinced, he said, that conscience was not to be
forced, that persecution was unfavourable to population and to trade,
and that it never attained the ends which persecutors had in view. He
repeated his promise, already often repeated and often violated, that
he would protect the Established Church in the enjoyment of her legal
rights. He then proceeded to annul, by his own sole authority, a long
series of statutes. He suspended all penal laws against all classes
of Nonconformists. He authorised both Roman Catholics and Protestant
Dissenters to perform their worship publicly. He forbade his subjects,
on pain of his highest displeasure, to molest any religious assembly.
He also abrogated all those acts which imposed any religious test as a
qualification for any civil or military office. [239]

That the Declaration of Indulgence was unconstitutional is a point on
which both the great English parties have always been entirely agreed.
Every person capable of reasoning on a political question must perceive
that a monarch who is competent to issue such a declaration is nothing
less than an absolute monarch. Nor is it possible to urge in defence
of this act of James those pleas by which many arbitrary acts of the
Stuarts have been vindicated or excused. It cannot be said that
he mistook the bounds of his prerogative because they had not been
accurately ascertained. For the truth is that he trespassed with a
recent landmark full in his view. Fifteen years before that time, a
Declaration