of his favourites, in order that they might
bargain with them for their pardons. Those
young ladies of Taunton who had presented
the Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of
honour at court; and those precious ladies
made very bad bargains with them, indeed
—employing a Quaker to drive the said
bargains. When The Bloody Assize was at
its most dismal height, the King was diverting
himself with horse-races in the very place
where Mrs. Lisle had been executed. When
Jeffreys had done his worst, and came home
again, he was particularly complimented in
the Royal Gazette; and when the King heard
that through drunkenness and raging he was
very ill, his odious Majesty remarked that
such another man could not easily be found
in England. Besides all this, a former sheriff
of London, named CORNISH, was hanged
within sight of his own house, after an
abominably conducted trial, for having had a
share in the Rye House Plot, on evidence
given by Rumsey, which that villian was
obliged to confess was directly opposed to
the evidence he had given on the trial of
Lord Russell. And on the very same day, a
worthy widow, named ELIZABETH GAUNT,
was burned alive at Tyburn, for having
sheltered a wretch who himself gave evidence
against her. She settled the fuel about her
with her own hands, so that the flames should
reach her quickly; and nobly said, with her
last breath, that she had obeyed the sacred
command of God, to give refuge to the
outcast, and not to betray the wanderer.

After all this hanging, beheading, burning,
boiling, mutilating, exposing, robbing,
transporting, and selling into slavery, of his
unhappy subjects, the King not unnaturally
thought that he could do whatever he would.
So, he went to work to change the religion
of the country with all possible speed; and
what he did was this.

He first of all tried to get rid of what was
called the Test Act, which prevented the
Catholics from holding public employments, by
his own power of dispensing with the
penalties. He tried it in one case, and eleven of
the twelve judges deciding in his favour he
exercised it in three others, being those
of three dignitaries of University College,
Oxford, who had become Papists (which
such people never do now, I believe,) and
whom he kept in their places and sanctioned.
He revived the hated Ecclesiastical
Commission, to get rid of COMPTON,
Bishop of London, who manfully opposed
him. He solicited the Pope to favour
England with an ambassador, which the Pope
(who was a sensible man then) rather
unwillingly did. He flourished Father Petre
before the eyes of the people on all possible
occasions. He favoured the establishment of
convents in several parts of London. He was
delighted to have the streets, and even the
court itself, filled with Monks and Friars in
the habits of their orders. He constantly
endeavoured to make Catholics of the
Protestants about him. He held private
interviews, which he called "closetings," with
those Members of Parliament who held
offices, to persuade them to consent to the
design he had in view. When they did not
consent, they were removed, or resigned of
themselves, and their places were given to
Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers
from the army by every means in his power,
and got Catholics into their places too. He
tried the same thing with corporations, and
also (though not so successfully) with the
Lord Lieutenants of counties. To terrify the
people into the endurance of all these
measures, he kept an army of fifteen
thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath,
where mass was openly performed in the
General's tent, and where priests went among
the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them
to become Catholics. For circulating a paper
among those men advising them to be true
to their religion, a Protestant clergyman,
named JOHNSON, the chaplain of the late
Lord Russell, was actually sentenced to stand
three times in the pillory, and was actually
whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He
dismissed his own brother-in-law from his
Council because he was a Protestant, and
made a Privy Councillor of the before-mentioned
Father Petre. He handed Ireland over
to RICHARD TALBOT, EARL OF TYRCONNEL, a
worthless, dissolute knave, who played the
same game there for his master, and who
played the deeper game for himself of one
day putting it under the protection of the
French King. In going to these extremities,
every man of sense and judgment among the
Catholics, from the Pope to a porter, knew
that the King was a mere bigoted fool,
who would undo himself and the cause he
sought to advance, but he was deaf to all
reason, and, happily for England ever
afterwards, went tumbling off his throne in his
own blind way.

A spirit began to arise in the country,
which the besotted blunderer little expected.
He first found it out in the University of
Cambridge. Having made a Catholic, a dean,
at Oxford, without any opposition, he tried
to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge:
which attempt the University resisted
and defeated him. He then went back to
his favourite Oxford. On the death of the
President of Magdalen College, he commanded
that there should be elected to succeed him
one MR. ANTHONY FARMER, whose only
recommendation was, that he was of the King's
religion. The University plucked up courage
at last, and refused. The King substituted
another man, and it still refused, resolving to
stand by its own election of a Mr. HOUGH.
The dull tyrant, upon this, punished Mr.
Hough and five-and-twenty more, by causing
them to be expelled and declared incapable of
holding any church preferment; then he
proceeded to what he supposed to be his highest