there apparently dead, and thus escaped any
further suffering; he was of the Anglo-Irish party, who were so
faithfully loyal to the crown, and whose loyalty was repaid with such
cold indifference; yet his virtues have been ignored, and Macaulay
accuses him of having "adhered to the old religion, like the Celts,"
which was true, and of "having taken part with them in the rebellion of
1641," which was not true.

James commenced his reign by proclaiming his desire for religious
liberty. Individually he may not have been much beyond the age in
opinion on this subject, but liberty of conscience was necessary for
himself. He was a Catholic, and he made no secret of his religion; he
was, therefore, obliged from this motive, if from no other, to accord
the same boon to his subjects. The Quakers were set free in England, and
the Catholics were set free in Ireland. But the Puritan faction, who had
commenced by fighting for liberty of conscience for themselves, and who
ended by fighting to deny liberty of conscience to others, were quite
determined that neither Quakers nor Catholics should worship God as they
believed themselves bound to do. Such intolerance, unhappily, was not
altogether confined to the illiterate. Coke, in a previous generation,
had declared that it was felony even to counsel the King to tolerate
Catholics; and Usher, that it was a deadly sin. The King had neither the
good sense nor the delicacy of feeling to guide him through these
perils. His difficulties, and the complications which ensued, belong to
the province of the English historian, but they were not the less felt
in Ireland.

The Protestants professed to be afraid of being massacred by the
Catholics; the Catholics apprehended a massacre from the Protestants.
Catholics were now admitted to the army, to the bar, and to the senate.
Protestants declared this an infringement of their rights, and forgot
how recently they had expelled their Catholic fellow-subjects, not
merely from honours and emoluments, but even from their altars and their
homes.

An event now occurred which brought affairs to a crisis. The King's
second wife, Mary of Modena, gave him an heir, and the heir appeared
likely to live (A.D. 1688). William of Orange, who had long flattered
himself that he should one day wear the crown of England, saw that no
time should be lost if he intended to secure the prize, and commenced
his preparations with all the ability and with all the duplicity f