ted from his benefice,
declared incapable of holding any other preferment, and charged with the
costs of the proceedings which had reduced him to beggary.

Such was the persecution with which James, smarting from his great
defeat in Westminster Hall, resolved to harass the clergy. Meanwhile he
tried to show the lawyers, by a prompt and large distribution of rewards
and punishments, that strenuous and unblushing servility, even when
least successful, was a sure title to his favour, and that whoever,
after years of obsequiousness, ventured to deviate but for one moment
into courage and honesty was guilty of an unpardonable offence.
The violence and audacity which the apostate Williams had exhibited
throughout the trial of the Bishops had made him hateful to the whole
nation. [433] He was recompensed with a baronetcy. Holloway and Powell
had raised their character by declaring that, in their judgment, the
petition was no libel. They were dismissed from their situations. [434]
The fate of Wright seems to have been, during some time, in suspense.
He had indeed summed up against the Bishops: but he had suffered their
counsel to question the dispensing power. He had pronounced the petition
a libel: but he had carefully abstained from pronouncing the Declaration
legal; and, through the whole proceeding, his tone had been that of a
man who remembered that a day of reckoning might come. He had indeed
strong claims to indulgence: for it was hardly to be expected that any
human impudence would hold out without flagging through such a task in
the presence of such a bar and of such an auditory. The members of the
Jesuitical cabal, however, blamed his want of spirit; the Chancellor
pronounced him a beast; and it was generally believed that a new Chief
Justice would be appointed. [435] But no change was made. It would
indeed have been no easy matter to supply Wright's place. The many
lawyers who were far superior to him in parts and learning were, with
scarcely an exception, hostile to the designs of the government; and
the very few lawyers who surpassed him in turpitude and effrontery were,
with scarcely an exception, to be found only in the lowest ranks of
the profession, and would have been incompetent to conduct the ordinary
business of the Court of King's Bench. Williams, it is true, united all
the qualities which James required in a magistrate. But the services
of Williams were needed at the bar; and, had he been moved thence, the