thousand pulpits, it had been solemnly declared by the University
of Oxford, that even tyranny as frightful as that of the most
depraved of the Caesars did not justify subjects in resisting the
royal authority; and hence he was weak enough to conclude that
the whole body of Tory gentlemen and clergymen would let him
plunder, oppress, and insult them without lifting an arm against
him. It seems strange that any man should have passed his
fiftieth year without discovering that people sometimes do what
they think wrong: and James had only to look into his own heart
for abundant proof that even a strong sense of religious duty
will not always prevent frail human beings from indulging their
passions in defiance of divine laws, and at the risk of awful
penalties. He must have been conscious that, though he thought
adultery sinful, he was an adulterer: but nothing could convince
him that any man who professed to think rebellion sinful would
ever, in any extremity, be a rebel. The Church of England was, in
his view, a passive victim, which he might, without danger,
outrage and torture at his pleasure; nor did he ever see his
error till the Universities were preparing to coin their plate
for the purpose of supplying the military chest of his enemies,
and till a Bishop, long renowned for loyalty, had thrown aside
his cassock, girt on a sword, and taken the command of a regiment
of insurgents.

In these fatal follies the King was artfully encouraged by a
minister who had been an Exclusionist, and who still called
himself a Protestant, the Earl of Sunderland. The motives and
conduct of this unprincipled politician have often been
misrepresented. He was, in his own lifetime, accused by the
Jacobites of having, even before the beginning of the reign of