Though a reaction against the Whigs was beginning, propaganda was needed
to disabuse the public of two anxieties--that there was still a danger
that Roman Catholicism might be restored and that the three dissolutions
might foreshadow a return to unparliamentary government such as Charles
I had established from 1629 to 1640, also after three dissolutions. The
royal party was at first on the defensive. Their propaganda began with a
proclamation issued on April 8 and ordered to be read in all churches.
In the proclamation the King posed as the champion of law and order
against a disloyal faction trying to overthrow the constitution. It was
read in churches on April 17 and, according to Luttrell's _Brief
Historical Relation_ (I, 77), "in many places was not very pleasing, but
afforded matter of sport to some persons." Among several replies was one
entitled _A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend_. Clearly
there was need to answer this pamphlet and to state more fully the case
against the Whigs. This task was undertaken by two of the greatest
writers of English prose--George Savile, then Earl, later Marquis of
Halifax, and John Dryden. Halifax, in the tract lately identified as his
by Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, 1940), _Observations upon a late
Libel_--though he might scarify an individual opponent like Shaftesbury
or pour ridicule upon a sentence from _A Letter_, set himself the task
of answering the Whig case as a whole. The text he dilated upon was:
"there seemeth to be no other Rule allowed by one sort of Men, than that
they cannot Err, and the King cannot be in the Right." With superb irony
and wit he demonstrated how inconsistent such an attitude was with the
constitution of that day.

Dryden's tract, _His Majesties Declaration Defended_ is, like the one
he is answering, in the form of a letter to a friend who has asked the
writer's opinion of the _Declaration_ and the answer to it. "I shall