he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign
and the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against
the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its
ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits
and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely
ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by
Protestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests and
spiritual and political contradictions. The prelates of the Established
Church must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of the
early part of his reign. Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to mingle
the voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, and
fawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under the
nostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England was
tainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rotting
on a thousand gibbets. While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and his
Presbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakers
and Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves for
the sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with the
heads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of every
name and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like David
among the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats,--the
thanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strain
of laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England. What mattered it
to men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sour
leaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy,
lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatching
Antichrist," that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured by
the great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long as
usurpation enured to their own benefit? But when King James issued his
Declaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side of