nness of her rulers,
sunk so low that any German or Italian principality which brought
five thousand men into the field was a more important member of the
commonwealth of nations.

With the sense of national humiliation was mingled anxiety for civil
liberty. Rumours, indistinct indeed, but perhaps the more alarming by
reason of their indistinctness, imputed to the court a deliberate design
against all the constitutional rights of Englishmen. It had even
been whispered that this design was to be carried into effect by the
intervention of foreign arms. The thought of Such intervention made the
blood, even of the Cavaliers, boil in their veins. Some who had always
professed the doctrine of non-resistance in its full extent were now
heard to mutter that there was one limitation to that doctrine. If a
foreign force were brought over to coerce the nation, they would not
answer for their own patience.

But neither national pride nor anxiety for public liberty had so
great an influence on the popular mind as hatred of the Roman Catholic
religion. That hatred had become one of the ruling passions of the
community, and was as strong in the ignorant and profane as in those
who were Protestants from conviction. The cruelties of Mary's reign,
cruelties which even in the most accurate and sober narrative excite
just detestation, and which were neither accurately nor soberly related
in the popular martyrologies, the conspiracies against Elizabeth, and
above all the Gunpowder Plot, had left in the minds of the vulgar a deep
and bitter feeling which was kept up by annual commemorations, prayers,
bonfires, and processions. It should be added that those classes which
were peculiarly distinguished by attachment to the throne, the clergy
and the landed gentry, had peculiar reasons for regarding the Church of
Rome with aversion. The clergy trembled for their benefices; the landed
gentry for their abbeys and great tithes. While the memory of the reign
of the Saints was still recent, hatred of Popery had in some degree
given place to hatred of Puritanism; but, during the eighteen years
which had elapsed since the Restoration, the hatred of Puritanism had
abated, and the hatred of Popery had increased. The stipulations of the
treaty of Dover were accurately known to very few; but some hints had
got abroad. The general impression was that a great blow was about to
be aimed at the Protestant religion. The King was suspected by many of a
leaning