yrannical, is most true. But it is not less true that they never
quite came up to the atrocious example set by their vanquished enemy
during his short tenure of power.

Indeed, while James was loudly boasting that he had passed an Act
granting entire liberty of conscience to all sects, a persecution as
cruel as that of Languedoc was raging through all the provinces which
owned his authority. It was said by those who wished to find an excuse
for him that almost all the Protestants who still remained in Munster,
Connaught, and Leinster were his enemies, and that it was not as
schismatics, but as rebels in heart, who wanted only opportunity
to become rebels in act, that he gave them up to be oppressed and
despoiled; and to this excuse some weight might have been allowed if
he had strenuously exerted himself to protect those few colonists, who,
though firmly attached to the reformed religion, were still true to the
doctrines of nonresistance and of indefeasible hereditary right. But
even these devoted royalists found that their heresy was in his view
a crime for which no services or sacrifices would atone. Three or
four noblemen, members of the Anglican Church, who had welcomed him to
Ireland, and had sate in his Parliament, represented to him that, if the
rule which forbade any Protestant to possess any weapon were strictly
enforced, their country houses would be at the mercy of the Rapparees,
and obtained from him permission to keep arms sufficient for a few
servants. But Avaux remonstrated. The indulgence, he said, was grossly
abused: these Protestant lords were not to be trusted: they were turning
their houses into fortresses: his Majesty would soon have reason to
repent his goodness. These representations prevailed; and Roman Catholic
troops were quartered in the suspected dwellings, [234]

Still harder was the lot of those Protestant clergymen who continued to
cling, with desperate fidelity, to the cause of the Lord's Anointed. Of
all the Anglican divines the one who had the largest share of James's
good graces seems to have been Cartwright. Whether Cartwright could
long have continued to be a favourite without being an apostate may
be doubted. He died a few weeks after his arrival in Ireland; and
thenceforward his church had no one to plead her cause. Nevertheless a
few of her prelates and priests continued for a time to teach what they
had taught in the days of the Exclusion Bill. But it was at the peril
of life or