him for a few years of patience. He did not indeed cease
to correspond with the Court of Saint Germains; but the correspondence
gradually became more and more slack, and seems, on his part, to have
been made up of vague professions and trifling excuses.

The event which had changed all Marlborough's views had filled the
minds of fiercer and more pertinacious politicians with wild hopes and
atrocious projects.

During the two years and a half which followed the execution of
Grandval, no serious design had been formed against the life of William.
Some hotheaded malecontents had indeed laid schemes for kidnapping
or murdering him; but those schemes were not, while his wife lived,
countenanced by her father. James did not feel, and, to do him justice,
was not such a hypocrite as to pretend to feel, any scruple about
removing his enemies by those means which he had justly thought base and
wicked when employed by his enemies against himself. If any such scruple
had arisen in his mind, there was no want, under his roof, of casuists
willing and competent to soothe his conscience with sophisms such as had
corrupted the far nobler natures of Anthony Babington and Everard
Digby. To question the lawfulness of assassination, in cases where
assassination might promote the interests of the Church, was to question
the authority of the most illustrious Jesuits, of Bellarmine and Suarez,
of Molina and Mariana; nay, it was to rebel against the Chair of Saint
Peter. One Pope had walked in procession at the head of his cardinals,
had proclaimed a jubilee, had ordered the guns of Saint Angelo to
be fired, in honour of the perfidious butchery in which Coligni had
perished. Another Pope had in a solemn allocution hymned the murder of
Henry the Third of France in rapturous language borrowed from the ode of
the prophet Habakkuk, and had extolled the murderer above Phinehas
and Judith. [590] William was regarded at Saint Germains as a monster
compared with whom Coligni and Henry the Third were saints. Nevertheless
James, during some years, refused to sanction any attempt on his
nephew's person. The reasons which he assigned for his refusal have come
down to us, as he wrote them with his own hand. He did not affect to
think that assassination was a sin which ought to be held in horror by a
Christian, or a villany unworthy of a gentleman; he merely said that
the difficulties were great, and that he would not push his friends
on extreme danger whe