During the great irritation against the Roman Cath- olics which followed the publication of the Titus Oates (q. V.) popish plot in 1678-79, the duke of York, by the advice of king Charles II, quitted England and took up his residence on the Continent. While he was absent efforts were made to exclude him from the throne, which would have been successful had not Parliament suddenly been prorogued (3Iay 27, 1679). In 1680 he returned again to England, but so great was the opposition to- wards him that Charles was obliged to send him down to govern Scotland. The odium in which the duke of York now stood among the English was further mani- fest by a second attempt to pass in Parliament a bill excluding him from the right of succession to the throne, which again failed by another prorogation of the coun- cil of the nation. This time, no doubt, the effort was mainly the result of the discreditable relation which the prince sustained towards the Meal-tub Plot, an attempt on the part of his co-religionists to counteract — and in this they were grievously disappointed — the effect of the Titus Oates plot discoveries. In 1682, when Charles was involved in difficulties with his concubine, the duke of York was invited over, and he improved the opportu- nity, and knew so well how to make himself an indis- pensable counsellor of his brother, that, in spite of the Test Act. he became (much more than Charles himself) " the mainspring and director of the conduct of public affairs." On the death of Charles II, Feb. 6, 1685, he succeeded to the throne, strangely enough, without the least opposition. His pledge to the people was, " I shall make it my endeavor to preserve this government, both in Church and State, as it is now by law established," a declaration which seemed rather necessary from a disci- ple of popery. It must, however, also be acknowledged that James II '' began his reign with a frank and open profession of his religion, for the first Sunday after his accession he went publicly to mass, and obliged father Huddleston, who attended his brother in his last hours, to declare to the world that he died a Roman Catholic" j (Neale, Puritans, Harpers edition, ii, 315). But if the people, though hesitatingly, yet tacitly, submitted to the freedom of the king to worship according to the dictates of his conscience, and even suffered Roman- ism, the very name of which, just at this time, was de- spised bj' nearly everj' English subject, to claim their ruler for its convert, yet his display of the theory that a king was not suliject to the criticisms of his peo- ple— in short, his theorj' of absolute supremacij soon aroused the nation from their lethargy, though it did not at once appear that the community would ever seek to relieve itself from the calamity which it had just in- curred. Greater still became the anxiety of the nation wlien it appeared that, '• in spite of his own solemn en-
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gagements to govern constitutionally, and heedless of ominous intimations which reached him, in the shape of addresses, that the religion of his subjects was dearer to them than their lives, he proceeded to carry out his projects with a recklessness amounting to infatuation" (Baxter, Ch. Hist. ]). Uo7). liight in his tirst measures, khig James showed, says Hume {Hist, of Emjhind, Har- per's edition, vi, 28(3), '' that either he was not sincere in his professions of attachment to the laws, or that lie en- tertained so lofty an idea of his own legal power that even his utmost sincerity would tend very little to se- cure the liberties of the people." Not satisfied with his avowed confession of Komanism, he even made unneces- sarj' and offensive displays of his religious principles, and thereby greatly wounded the pride of his subjects. The mass was openly celebrated with great pomp at Westminster in Passion Week of this year (1G85) ; an agent was sent to Itome to announce the king's submis- sion to the so-called vicar of Christ ; a close alliance was entered into with France; and it was even generally hinted that " the Church of England was in principle so closely allied to the Roman Catholic that it would not be difficult to prepare the way for the readmission of the English into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Chiurch" (comp. Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain, Append, pt. i, p. 100-113 ; Fox, Hist, of early Part of the Rn(jn of James II). All this, too, was done at a time when '• there was among the EngUsh a strong con- viction that the Roman Catholic, where the interests of his religion were concerned, thought himself free from all the ordinary rules of morality ; nay, that he thought it meritorious to violate those nUes, if by so doing he could avert injury or reproach from the Church of which he was a member;" at a time when "Roman Catholic casuists of great eminence had written in defence of equivocation, of mental reservation, of perjury, and even of assassiifation," and the fruits of this odious school of sophists were seen in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the murder of the tirst William of Orange, the murder of Henry III of France, the numerous conspiracies which had been formed against the life of Elizabeth, and, above all, the Gunpowder Plot, and when all these could con- stantly be cited " as instances of the close connection between vicious theory and vicious practice" — a series of crimes which, it was alleged, had every one of them been prompted or applauded by Roman Catholic priests (comp. Macaulay, Hist, of England, Harper's edit., ii, 5 sq.). It was certainly sheer madness (and we need not wonder that the so-claimed successor of Peter even so declared it) to still further aggravate the opposition of his subjects by ]icrsecution for religious belief. Him- self anxious to obtain for the members of his own con- fession complete toleration, which, after all, was only "natural and right," it seems simply preposterous to find him persecuting the Puritans. Almost immediate- ly after his accession to the throne James II convoked the Parliament of Scotland, where the majority of the population was firmly attached to the Presbyterian dis- cipline, and where prelacy was abhorred " as an unscrip- tural and as a foreign institution." and demanded new laws against the unruly Presbyterians, who already "closely associated the episcopal polity with all the evils produced by twenty-five years of corrupt and cruel maladministration." In a slavish spirit, the Scottish Parliament complied with the royal request, forbidding under the death penalty preaching in any Presbyterian conventicle whatever, and even attendance on such a conventicle in the open air (May 8, 1685). A short time after, the Parliament of England also was con- voked (^lay 10). Avhich, as readily as the Scottish, complied with the demands of the king, but, to his great sorrow, nevertheless evinced the possibility of opposition to poperj-, for which he was anxious to se- cure concessions. But while both Parliaments were thus slavishly submitting to the wishes of the absolutist, the countries were invaded, and this afforded the king a favorable pretext fur the introduction of Romanists