without distinction.

After the Restoration, the Cavaliers who filled the House of
Commons, zealous as they were for the prerogative, still
remembered with bitterness the tyranny of the High Commission,
and were by no means disposed to revive an institution so odious.
They at the same time thought, and not without reason, that the
statute which had swept away all the courts Christian of the
realm, without providing any substitute, was open to grave
objection. They accordingly repealed that statute, with the
exception of the part which related to the High Commission. Thus,
the Archidiaconal Courts, the Consistory Courts, the Court of
Arches, the Court of Peculiars, and the Court of Delegates were
revived: but the enactment by which Elizabeth and her successors
had been empowered to appoint Commissioners with visitatorial
authority over the Church was not only not revived, but was
declared, with the utmost strength of language, to be completely
abrogated. It is therefore as clear as any point of
constitutional law can be that James the Second was not competent
to appoint a Commission with power to visit and govern the Church
of England.94 But, if this were so, it was to little purpose that
the Act of Supremacy, in high sounding words, empowered him to
amend what was amiss in that Church. Nothing but a machinery as
stringent as that which the Long Parliament had destroyed could
force the Anglican clergy to become his agents for the
destruction of the Anglican doctrine and discipline. He
therefore, as early as the month of April 1686, determined to
create a new Court of High Commission. This design was not
immediately executed. It encountered the opposition of every
minister who was not devoted to France and to the Jesuits. It was