A new high commission court.

estant church. These objectors the king determined to silence. He accordingly organized an Ecclesiastical Commission, much like the high commission court1 that had been abolished by the Long Parliament, only its authority was not to extend to laymen. Jeffreys, who had once boasted that he could "smell a Presbyterian forty miles," was one of its leading spirits. The first case to come before the commission was that of Compton, the bishop of London, who had refused to punish a priest for criticising the king's appointments. Bishop Compton was suspended. It was this same commission that expelled the fellows of Magdalen College. The commission also had occasion to discipline the authorities of the University of Cambridge for refusing to give a degree to a Benedictine monk. Among those who appeared before Jeffreys and his associates on that occasion was Isaac Newton, who was professor of mathematics. "Sin no more," was the warning of the notorious judge, "lest a worse thing happen unto you."

379. The First Declaration of Indulgence.2 1687. Realizing that he had made enemies of the Tory churchmen, James now turned for moral support to the dissenters who Declaration of were largely Whigs. In April, 1687, he issued his Indulgence. first Declaration of Indulgence by which he suspended all the laws against Catholicism and dissent and granted freedom of worship to all. The old recusancy laws dating from Elizabeth's time and the Conventicle Act with the other laws of the Clarendon Code were thus swept away. There was much iniquity in these laws; but if the king could set aside bad laws, he could also annul any other law. Moreover, his hands were not clean and his purposes scarcely honest. As the declaration was issued only a few days before the king's interference at Magdalen College, it soon became clear to most men that his professions of tolerance had a purpose behind them. The Anglicans, at least, were not to share in this new freedom. There were many strong partisans of the Stuarts among the 2 Gardiner, 640-641.

1 Review secs. 282, 306.

Stuart partisans among the Dissenters.

dissenters, the most notable of whom was the famous Quaker chief, William Penn. These were in favor of accepting the royal gift, and their influence was strong with many, especially with Quakers and Baptists. But the great majority, the Presbyterians in particular, refused to accept a privilege that was denied them by the laws of the land.

380. The Second Declaration: the Protest of the Seven Bishops. 1688. A year later (April, 1688), James II issued a second Declaration of Indulgence in which he reaffirmed the earlier grant; he also ordered that this document should be read in all the Anglican churches. The church rebelled; only

THE SEVEN BISHOPS ON THEIR. WAY TO THE TOWER

From a Dutch print dated 1689.

a very few priests obeyed the mandate. Seven bishops led by the archbishop of Canterbury drew up a petition to the king

Trial of the seven bishops.

requesting him to excuse the priests from reading the declaration.1 Startled and angry the king replied: "This is rebellion. . . . I will have my declaration published." Legal action was brought against the

1 Cheyney, No. 330; Gardiner, 642-643; Kendall, No. 98.

STUART TYRANNY IN SCOTLAND

407

bishops, the charge being that they had libeled the king; but the jury refused to convict.1

The situation

in Scotland.

381. Stuart Tyranny in Scotland. By midsummer, 1688, James II had alienated almost the entire English nation; even the Catholics, most of whom longed for peace rather than for power, hesitated to follow a king who showed so little discretion. In Scotland the situation was, if possible, even worse. Like the English the Scots had rejoiced in the restoration of the Stuart dynasty; but when the new government insisted on ruling the national church through bishops, the Presbyterians resisted. In 1638 they had signed a pledge, the National Covenant, to maintain Presbyterianism, and on this act, which they regarded as a part of the national constitution, they based their right to resist. In 1679, when England was in a ferment over the exclusion bill, actual civil war broke out between the extreme Covenanters of the southwest, to whom bishops were an abomination, and the supporters of the king, who found bishops acceptable. Civil war. James, then duke of York, came to Scotland to 1679. put down the uprising. With the assistance of "Bloody " Claverhouse, a famous and capable soldier who led the royalist forces, and "Bloody" Mackenzie, a learned and active lawyer, who prosecuted the rebels in the courts, he made considerable headway. Torture and the gallows were freely employed. The Covenanters replied with a threat to assassinate any one who should interfere with their rights or their persons. Such 1685. was the situation early in 1685 when Charles died. When James became king the work of repression was carried on even more vigorously. A few months after his accession the Scotch parliament enacted that persons who at The "killing tended conventicles "were to be henceforth pun

time."

ished by death." The first two years of James' reign are known in Scotland as the "killing time."

In 1687, soon after he had entered upon his new policy of toleration in England, James II asked the Scotch parliament

1 Bates and Coman, 345; Innes, II, 158-162; Kendall, No. 99.

Efforts to promote Catholicism.

for an act of toleration in favor of his "innocent subjects, those of the Roman Catholic religion." When this was refused, he dismissed parliament and published a Declaration of Indulgence for Scotland, which extended freedom of worship to all but the extreme Covenanters. Otherwise, too, the king showed that he was determined to promote his own faith: as in England, he was purging the privy council of Protestant members and appointing Catholics in their stead. Mass was said in Holyrood chapel. The result was a truce between the Covenanters and the Episcopalians they had now the common problem of how best to meet the aggressions of Romanism, which they feared and hated even more than they hated each other.

382. The Succession: the Birth of a Prince. 1688. The hopes of the English and Scotch Protestants were centered about the king's oldest daughter, Mary, who was heiress presumptive to the crowns of Britain. Mary had been educated as a Protestant and had remained true to her faith. At the age of fifteen she had been given in marriage to her cousin, William William of of Orange, the chief executive of the Dutch ReOrange. public. Mary had all the virtues that belonged to the higher type of womanhood, all except strength and independent spirit: she was completely under the domination of her strong-souled husband. The leaders of the opposition to James II did not enjoy the thought of having the stern and silent Dutchman as their regent; but the king was becoming impossible, and they were not sure that they could allow him to reign in peace very many years longer.

In the spring of 1688, the fear spread that Mary might never become the queen of England. It was reported that the king had visited a holy well in Wales and had been assured that a son would be born to him and that the child would live. On June 10, the boy was born, to the great joy of King James, who had now an heir whom he could bring up in the Catholic faith, but to the great disgust of the English people, who had been "waiting for better days," but

The birth

of a prince.