the place where the writings of the great republican
teachers had recently been committed to the flames, should now be in a
ferment of discontent, that those highspirited youths who a few months
before had eagerly volunteered to march against the Western insurgents
should now be with difficulty kept down by sword and carbine, these were
signs full of evil omen to the House of Stuart. The warning, however,
was lost on the dull, stubborn, self-willed tyrant. He was resolved
to transfer to his own Church all the wealthiest and most splendid
foundations of England. It was to no purpose that the best and wisest
of his Roman Catholic counsellors remonstrated. They represented to him
that he had it in his power to render a great service to the cause of
his religion without violating the rights of property. A grant of two
thousand pounds a year from his privy purse would support a Jesuit
college at Oxford. Such a sum he might easily spare. Such a college,
provided with able, learned, and zealous teachers, would be a formidable
rival to the old academical institutions, which exhibited but too many
symptoms of the languor almost inseparable from opulence and security.
King James's College would soon be, by the confession even of
Protestants, the first place of education in the island, as respected
both science and moral discipline. This would be the most effectual
and the least invidious method by which the Church of England could be
humbled and the Church of Rome exalted. The Earl of Ailesbury, one of
the most devoted servants of the royal family, declared that, though a
Protestant, and by no means rich, he would himself contribute a thousand
pounds towards this design, rather than that his master should violate
the rights of property, and break faith with the Established Church.
[288] The scheme, however, found no favour in the sight of the King. It
was indeed ill suited in more ways than one, to his ungentle nature. For
to bend and break the spirits of men gave him pleasure; and to part with
his money gave him pain. What he had not the generosity to do at his own
expense he determined to do at the expense of others. When once he was
engaged, pride and obstinacy prevented him from receding; and he was
at length led, step by step, to acts of Turkish tyranny, to acts which
impressed the nation with a conviction that the estate of a Protestant
English freeholder under a Roman Catholic King must be as insecure as
that of a Greek und