or was
sealing up the papers of the Churchills, the Princess's nurse broke into
the royal apartments crying out that the dear lady had been murdered by
the Papists. The news flew to Westminster Hall. There the story was that
Her Highness had been hurried away by force to a place of confinement.
When it could no longer be denied that her flight had been voluntary,
numerous fictions were invented to account for it. She had been grossly
insulted; she had been threatened; nay, though she was in that situation
in which woman is entitled to peculiar tenderness, she had been beaten
by her cruel stepmother. The populace, which years of misrule had made
suspicious and irritable, was so much excited by these calumnies that
the Queen was scarcely safe. Many Roman Catholics, and some Protestant
Tories whose loyalty was proof to all trials, repaired to the palace
that they might be in readiness to defend her in the event of an
outbreak. In the midst of this distress and tenor arrived the news of
Prince George's flight. The courier who brought these evil tidings was
fast followed by the King himself. The evening was closing in when James
arrived, and was informed that his daughter had disappeared. After all
that he had suffered, this affliction forced a cry of misery from his
lips. "God help me," he said; "my own children have forsaken me." [546]

That evening he sate in Council with his principal ministers, till
a late hour. It was determined that he should summon all the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal who were then in London to attend him on
the following day, and that he should solemnly ask their advice.
Accordingly, on the afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-seventh, the Lords
met in the dining room of the palace. The assembly consisted of nine
prelates and between thirty and forty secular nobles, all Protestants.
The two Secretaries of State, Middleton and Preston, though not peers
of England, were in attendance. The King himself presided. The traces of
severe bodily and mental suffering were discernible in his countenance
and deportment. He opened the proceedings by referring to the petition
which had been put into his hands just before he set out for Salisbury.
The prayer of that petition was that he would convoke a free Parliament.
Situated as he then was, he had not, he said, thought it right to
comply. But, during his absence from London, great changes had taken
place. He had also observed that his people everywhere seemed anxious