ich he was devotedly attached, after
he had been insulted and threatened in his own choir by the soldiers,
after he had been interdicted from burying in his own churchyard, and
from preaching in his own pulpit, after he had narrowly escaped with
life from a musketshot fired at him in the street, he began to think the
Whig theory of government less unreasonable and unchristian than it had
once appeared to him, and persuaded himself that the oppressed Church
might lawfully accept deliverance, if God should be pleased, by whatever
means, to send it to her.

In no long time it appeared that James would have done well to hearken
to those counsellors who had told him that the acts by which he was
trying to make himself popular in one of his three kingdoms, would make
him odious in the others. It was in some sense fortunate for England
that, after he had ceased to reign here, he continued during more than a
year to reign in Ireland. The Revolution had been followed by a reaction
of public feeling in his favour. That reaction, if it had been suffered
to proceed uninterrupted, might perhaps not have ceased till he was
again King: but it was violently interrupted by himself. He would not
suffer his people to forget: he would not suffer them to hope: while
they were trying to find excuses for his past errors, and to persuade
themselves that he would not repeat these errors, he forced upon them,
in their own despite, the conviction that he was incorrigible, that the
sharpest discipline of adversity had taught him nothing, and that, if
they were weak enough to recall him, they would soon have to depose him
again. It was in vain that the Jacobites put forth pamphlets about the
cruelty with which he had been treated by those who were nearest to him
in blood, about the imperious temper and uncourteous manners of William,
about the favour shown to the Dutch, about the heavy taxes, about the
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, about the dangers which threatened
the Church from the enmity of Puritans and Latitudinarians. James
refuted these pamphlets far more effectually than all the ablest and
most eloquent Whig writers united could have done. Every week came
the news that he had passed some new Act for robbing or murdering
Protestants. Every colonist who succeeded in stealing across the sea
from Leinster to Holyhead or Bristol, brought fearful reports of the
tyranny under which his brethren groaned. What impression these reports
made o