urged in extenuation of the guilt of almost all other
persecutors: for the religion which he commanded the refugees to
profess, on pain of being left to starve, was not his own
religion. His conduct towards them was therefore less excusable
than that of Lewis: for Lewis oppressed them in the hope of
bringing them over from a damnable heresy to the true Church:
James oppressed them only for the purpose of forcing them to
apostatize from one damnable heresy to another.

Several Commissioners, of whom the Chancellor was one, had been
appointed to dispense the public alms. When they met for the
first time, Jeffreys announced the royal pleasure. The refugees,
he said, were too generally enemies of monarchy and episcopacy.
If they wished for relief, they must become members of the Church
of England, and must take the sacrament from the hands of his
chaplain. Many exiles, who had come full of gratitude and hope to
apply for succour, heard their sentence, and went brokenhearted
away.80

May was now approaching; and that month had been fixed for the
meeting of the Houses: but they were again prorogued to
November.81 It was not strange that the King did not wish to meet
them: for he had determined to adopt a policy which he knew to
be, in the highest degree, odious to them. From his predecessors
he had inherited two prerogatives, of which the limits had never
been defined with strict accuracy, and which, if exerted without
any limit, would of themselves have sufficed to overturn the
whole polity of the State and of the Church. These were the
dispensing power and the ecclesiastical supremacy. By means of
the dispensing power the King purposed to admit Roman Catholics,