CHAP.
VIII.

were shown to the royal wishes, the trade in tin should be
freed from the oppressive restrictions under which it lay.
But this lure, which at another time would have proved
irresistible, was now slighted. All the Justices and Deputy
Lieutenants of Devonshire and Cornwall, without a single
dissenting voice, declared that they would put life and pro-
perty in jeopardy for the King, but that the Protestant
religion was dearer to them than either life or property.
And, sir," said Bath, "if Your Majesty should dismiss all
these gentlemen, their successors would give exactly the same
answer."*
If there was any district in which the govern-
ment might have hoped for success, that district was Lan-
cashire. Considerable doubts had been felt as to the result
of what was passing there. In no part of the realm had so
many opulent and honourable families adhered to the old
religion. The heads of many of those families had already,
by virtue of the dispensing power, been made Justices of
the Peace and entrusted with commands in the militia. Yet
from Lancashire the new Lord Lieutenant, himself a Roman
Catholic, reported that two thirds of his deputies and of the
magistrates were opposed to the Court. But the proceed-
ings in Hampshire wounded the King's pride still more
deeply. Arabella Churchill had, more than twenty years
before, borne him a son, widely renowned, at a later period,
as one of the most skilful captains of Europe. The youth,
named James Fitzjames, had as yet given no promise of the
eminence which he afterwards attained: but his manners
were so gentle and inoffensive that he had no enemy except
Mary of Modena, who had long hated the child of the con-
cubine with the bitter hatred of a childless wife. A small
part of the Jesuitical faction had, before the pregnancy of
the Queen was announced, seriously thought of setting him
up as a competitor of the Princess of Orange. When it is
remembered how signally Monmouth, though believed by the
populace to be legitimate, and though the champion of the
national religion, had failed in a similar competition, it must
seem extraordinary that any man should have been so much
blinded by fanaticism as to think of placing on the throne
one who was universally known to be a Popish bastard.
does not appear that this absurd design was ever counte-

* Van Citters, April 18. 1688.
The anxiety about Lancashire is
mentioned by Van Citters, in a despatch

18

28

dated Nov. 1. 1687; the result in a despatch dated four days later.

Bonrepaux, July . 1687.

nanced by the King. The boy, however, was acknowledged; and whatever distinctions a subject, not of the royal blood, could hope to attain were bestowed on him. He had been created Duke of Berwick; and he was now loaded with honourable and lucrative employments, taken from those noblemen who had refused to comply with the royal commands. He succeeded the Earl of Oxford as Colonel of the Blues, and the Earl of Gainsborough as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, Ranger of the New Forest, and Governor of Portsmouth. On the frontier of Hampshire Berwick expected to have been met, according to custom, by a long cavalcade of baronets, knights, and squires: but not a single person of note appeared to welcome him. He sent out letters commanding the attendance of the gentry: but only five or six paid the smallest attention to his summons. The rest did not wait to be dismissed. They declared that they would take no part in the civil or military government of their county while the King was represented there by a Papist, and voluntarily laid down their commissions.*

Sunderland, who had been named Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire in the room of the Earl of Northampton, found some excuse for not going down to face the indignation and contempt of the gentry of that shire; and his plea was the more readily admitted because the King had, by that time, begun to feel that the spirit of the rustic gentry was not to be bent.†

It is to be observed that those who displayed this spirit were not the old enemies of the House of Stuart. The Commissions of Peace and Lieutenancy had long been carefully purged of all republican names. The persons from whom the Court had in vain attempted to extract any promise of support were, with scarcely an exception, Tories. The elder among them could still show scars given by the swords of Roundheads, and receipts for plate sent to Charles the First in his distress. The younger had adhered firmly to James against Shaftesbury and Monmouth. Such were the men who were now turned out of office in a mass by the very prince to whom they had given such signal proofs of fidelity. Dismission however only made them more resolute. It had become a sacred point of honour among them to stand stoutly by one another in this crisis. There could be no doubt that, if the suffrage of the freeholders

* Van Citters. Feb. 1688.

+ Ibid. April. 1688.

CHAP.

VIII.

CHAP,
VIII.

List of
Sheriffs.

of the Roman

country

were fairly taken, not a single knight of the shire favourable to the policy of the government would be returned. Men therefore asked one another, with no small anxiety, whether the suffrages were likely to be fairly taken. The list of the Sheriffs for the new year was impatiently expected. It appeared while the Lord Lieutenants were still engaged in their canvass, and was received with a general cry of alarm and indignation. Most of the functionaries who were to preside at the county elections were either Roman Catholics or Protestant Dissenters who had expressed their approbation of the Indulgence.* For a time the most gloomy apprehensions prevailed: but soon they began to subside. There was good reason to believe that there was a point beyond which the King could not reckon on the support even of those Sheriffs who were members of his own Church. BeCharacter tween the Roman Catholic courtier and the Roman Catholic country gentleman there was very little sympathy. That Catholic cabal which domineered at Whitehall consisted partly of gentlemen. fanatics, who were ready to break through all rules of morality and to throw the world into confusion for the purpose of propagating their religion, and partly of hypocrites who, for lucre, had apostatised from the faith in which they had been brought up, and who now overacted the zeal characteristic of neophytes. Both the fanatical and the hypocritical courtiers were generally destitute of all English feeling. In some of them devotion to their Church had extinguished every national sentiment. Some were Irishmen, whose patriotism consisted in mortal hatred of the Saxon conquerors of Ireland. Some, again, were traitors, who received regular hire from a foreign power. Some had passed a great part of their lives abroad, and either were mere cosmopolites, or felt a positive distaste for the manners and institutions of the the country which was now subjected to their rule. Between such men and the lord of a Cheshire or Staffordshire manor who adhered to the old Church there was scarcely anything in common. He was neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite. He was a Roman Catholic because his father and grandfather had been so; and he held his hereditary faith, as men generally hold a hereditary faith, sincerely, but with little enthusiasm. In all other points he was a mere English squire, and, if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more simple and clownish

* London Gazette, Dec. 5. 1687; Van Citters, Dec.

VIII.

than they. The disabilities under which he lay had pre- CHAP. vented his mind from expanding to the standard, moderate as that standard was, which the minds of Protestant country gentlemen then ordinarily attained. Excluded, when a boy, from Eton and Westminster, when a youth, from Oxford and Cambridge, when a man, from Parliament and from the bench of justice, he generally vegetated as quietly as the elms of the avenue which led to his ancestral grange. His cornfields, his dairy, and his cider press, his greyhounds, his fishing rod, and his gun, his ale and his tobacco, occupied almost all his thoughts. With his neighbours, in spite of his religion, he was generally on good terms. They knew him to be unambitious and inoffensive. He was almost always of a good old family. He was always a Cavalier. His peculiar notions were not obtruded, and caused no annoyance. He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant. On the contrary, he was as keen a sportsman, and as jolly a boon companion, as any man who had taken the oath of supremacy and the declaration against transubstantiation. He met his brother squires at the cover, was in with them at the death, and, when the sport was over, took them home with him to a venison pasty and to October four years in bottle. The oppressions which he had undergone had not been such as to impel him to any desperate resolution. Even when his Church was barbarously persecuted, his life and property were in little danger. The most impudent false witnesses could hardly venture to shock the common sense of mankind by accusing him of being a conspirator. The Papists whom Oates selected for attack were peers, prelates, Jesuits, Benedictines, a busy political agent, a lawyer in high practice. The Roman Catholic country gentleman, protected by his obscurity, by his peaceable demeanour, and by the good will of those among whom he lived, carted his hay or filled his bag with game unmolested, while Coleman and Langhorne, Whitbread and Pickering, Archbishop Plunkett and Lord Stafford, died by the halter or the axe. An attempt was indeed made by a knot of villains to bring home a charge of treason to Sir Thomas Gascoigne, an aged Roman Catholic baronet of Yorkshire: but twelve gentlemen of the West Riding, who knew his way of life, could not be convinced that their honest old acquaintance had hired cutthroats to murder the King, and, in spite of charges which did very

CHAP.
VIII.

Feeling of the Dissenters.

little honour to the bench, found a verdict of Not Guilty. Sometimes, indeed, the head of an old and respectable provincial family might reflect with bitterness that he was excluded, on account of his religion, from places of honour and authority which men of humbler descent and less ample estate were thought competent to fill: but he was little disposed to risk land and life in a struggle against overwhelming odds; and his honest English spirit would have shrunk with horror from means such as were contemplated by the Petres and Tyrconnels. Indeed he would have been as ready as any of his Protestant neighbours to gird on his sword, and to put pistols in his holsters, for the defence of his native land against an invasion of French or Irish Papists. Such was the general character of the men to whom James now looked as to his most trustworthy instruments for the conduct of county elections. He soon found that they were not inclined to throw away the esteem of their neighbours, and to endanger their heads and their estates, by rendering him an infamous and criminal service. Several of them refused to be Sheriffs. Of those who accepted the shrievalty many declared that they would discharge their duty as fairly as if they were members of the Established Church, and would return no candidate who had not a real majority.*

If the King could place little confidence even in his Roman Catholic Sheriffs, still less could he rely on the Puritans. Since the publication of the Declaration several months had elapsed, months crowded with important events, months of unintermitted controversy. Discussion had opened the eyes

have refused to be Sheriffs or Deputy Lieutenants." Dec. 8. 1687.

Ronquillo says the same. "Algunos Catolicos que fueron nombrados por sherifes se han excusado," Jan. 1688. He some months later assured his court that the Catholic country gentlemen would willingly consent to a compromise of which the terms should be that the penal laws should be abolished and the test retained. Estoy informado,” he says, 66 que los Catolicos de las provincias no lo reprueban, pues no pretendiendo oficios, y siendo solo algunos de la Corte los provechosos, les parece que mejoran su estado, quedando seguros ellos y sus descendientes en la religion, en la quietud, y en la seguridad de sus haciendas." 1688.

July 23.
Aug. 2.