an to subside. There
was good reason to believe that there was a point beyond which the King
could not reckon on the support even of those Sheriffs who were members
of his own Church. Between the Roman Catholic courtier and the Roman
Catholic country gentleman there was very little sympathy. That cabal
which domineered at Whitehall consisted partly of fanatics, who were
ready to break through all rules of morality and to throw the world into
confusion for the purpose of propagating their religion, and partly of
hypocrites, who, for lucre, had apostatized from the faith in which they
had been brought up, and who now over acted the zeal characteristic
of neophytes. Both the fanatical and the hypocritical courtiers were
generally destitute of all English feeling. In some of them devotion
to their Church had extinguished every national sentiment. Some were
Irishmen, whose patriotism consisted in mortal hatred of the Saxon
conquerors of Ireland. Some, again, were traitors, who received regular
hire from a foreign power. Some had passed a great part of their lives
abroad, and either were mere cosmopolites, or felt a positive distaste
for the manners and institutions of the country which was now
subjected to their rule. Between such men and the lord of a Cheshire
or Staffordshire manor who adhered to the old Church there was scarcely
anything in common. He was neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite. He was a
Roman Catholic because his father and grandfather had been so; and he
held his hereditary faith, as men generally hold a hereditary faith,
sincerely, but with little enthusiasm. In all other points he was a
mere English squire, and, if he differed from the neighbouring squires,
differed from them by being somewhat more simple and clownish than
they. The disabilities under which he lay had prevented his mind from
expanding to the standard, moderate as that standard was, which
the minds of Protestant country gentlemen then ordinarily attained.
Excluded, when a boy, from Eton and Westminster, when a youth, from
Oxford and Cambridge, when a man, from Parliament and from the bench
of justice, he generally vegetated as quietly as the elms of the avenue
which led to his ancestral grange. His cornfields, his dairy and his
cider press, his greyhounds, his fishing rod and his gun, his ale and
his tobacco, occupied almost all his thoughts. With his neighbours, in
spite of his religion, he was generally on good terms. They knew him
to be un