and had, on one occasion, made a false affidavit in order to obtain
possession of five hundred pounds. Poor, dissolute, and shameless,
he had become one of the parasites of Jeffreys, who promoted him and
insulted him. Such was the man who was now selected by James to be
Lord Chief justice of England. One Richard Allibone, who was even more
ignorant of the law than Wright, and who, as a Roman Catholic, was
incapable of holding office, was appointed a puisne judge of the King's
Bench. Sir Bartholomew Shower, equally notorious as a servile Tory and
a tedious orator, became Recorder of London. When these changes had been
made, several deserters were brought to trial. They were convicted
in the face of the letter and of the spirit of the law. Some received
sentence of death at the bar of the King's Bench, some at the Old
Bailey. They were hanged in sight of the regiments to which they had
belonged; and care was taken that the executions should be announced in
the London Gazette, which very seldom noticed such events. [282]

It may well be believed, that the law, so grossly insulted by courts
which derived from it all their authority, and which were in the habit
of looking to it as their guide, would be little respected by a tribunal
which had originated in tyrannical caprice. The new High Commission had,
during the first months of its existence, merely inhibited clergymen
from exercising spiritual functions. The rights of property had remained
untouched. But, early in the year 1687, it was determined to strike at
freehold interests, and to impress on every Anglican priest and prelate
the conviction that, if he refused to lend his aid for the purpose of
destroying the Church of which he was a minister, he would in an hour be
reduced to beggary.

It would have been prudent to try the first experiment on some obscure
individual. But the government was under an infatuation such as, in a
more simple age, would have been called judicial. War was therefore at
once declared against the two most venerable corporations of the realm,
the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The power of those bodies has during many ages been great; but it was
at the height during the latter part of the seventeenth century. None
of the neighbouring countries could boast of such splendid and opulent
seats of learning. The schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Leyden and
Utrecht, of Louvain and Leipzig, of Padua and Bologna, seemed mean to
scholars w