of danger, they are not likely
to allow it to be seen. It was not lack of personal bravery that
marred the chances of James Stuart.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's sympathies]

It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have
met with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that
James might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he
would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It
was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by
statesmen in power--by Oxford and by Bolingbroke--that if he could not
actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one,
and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church.
James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any meanness so
ignoble and detestable. His conduct in thus adhering to his
convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted
with that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a
mass!" But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard
to his conversion. Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him
to become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had
always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart.
Sully gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of
Henry's own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and
the turn of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith,
commenting shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself
more than once on the field of battle in the presence of danger. Thus,
according to Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic,
would be only following the bent of his own natural inclinations.
However that may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by
changing his profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown,
and that James the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change,
lost his best chance of a throne.

What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession? There
cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went. There
is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas
Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and published
in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King. It is called
on its title-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign of
Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Con