the error of his contemporaries.
He was perfectly aware of the suspicions which were abroad. [378] He
ought to have known that those suspicions would not be dispelled by the
evidence of members of the Church of Rome, or of persons who, though
they might call themselves members of the Church of England, had shown
themselves ready to sacrifice the interests of the Church of England in
order to obtain his favour. That he was taken by surprise is true. But
he had twelve hours to make his arrangements. He found no difficulty in
crowding St. James's Palace with bigots and sycophants on whose word the
nation placed no reliance. It would have been quite as easy to
procure the attendance of some eminent persons whose attachment to the
Princesses and to the established religion was unquestionable.

At a later period, when he had paid dearly for his foolhardy contempt
of public opinion, it was the fashion at Saint Germains to excuse him
by throwing the blame on others. Some Jacobites charged Anne with having
purposely kept out of the way. Nay, they were not ashamed to say that
Sancroft had provoked the King to send him to the Tower, in order that
the evidence which was to confound the calumnies of the malecontents
might be defective. [379] The absurdity of these imputations is
palpable. Could Anne or Sancroft possibly have foreseen that the Queen's
calculations would turn out to be erroneous by a whole month? Had those
calculations been correct, Anne would have been back from Bath, and
Sancroft would have been out of the Tower, in ample time for the birth.
At all events the maternal uncles of the King's daughters were neither
at a distance nor in a prison. The same messenger who summoned the
whole bevy of renegades, Dover, Peterborough, Murray, Sunderland, and
Mulgrave, could just as easily have summoned Clarendon. If they were
Privy Councillors, so was he. His house was in Jermyn Street, not two
hundred yards from the chamber of the Queen. Yet he was left to learn at
St. James's Church, from the agitation and whispers of the congregation,
that his niece had ceased to be heiress presumptive of the crown. [380]
Was it a disqualification that he was the near kinsman of the Princesses
of Orange and Denmark? Or was it a disqualification that he was
unalterably attached to the Church of England?

The cry of the whole nation was that an imposture bad been practised.
Papists had, during some months, been predicting, from, the pulpit and