id; "but he is as fond of my pistoles as ever his brother
was." Soon, however, the altered demeanour of James, and the hopes with
which that demeanour inspired both the branches of the House of Austria,
began to call for more serious notice. A remarkable letter is still
extant, in which the French King intimated a strong suspicion that he
had been duped, and that the very money which he had sent to Westminster
would be employed against him. [250]

By this time England had recovered from the sadness and anxiety caused
by the death of the goodnatured Charles. The Tories were loud in
professions of attachment to their new master. The hatred of the Whigs
was kept down by fear. That great mass which is not steadily Whig or
Tory, but which inclines alternately to Whiggism and to Toryism, was
still on the Tory side. The reaction which had followed the dissolution
of the Oxford parliament had not yet spent its force.

The King early put the loyalty of his Protestant friends to the proof.
While he was a subject, he had been in the habit of hearing mass with
closed doors in a small oratory which had been fitted up for his wife.
He now ordered the doors to be thrown open, in order that all who came
to pay their duty to him might see the ceremony. When the host was
elevated there was a strange confusion in the antechamber. The Roman
Catholics fell on their knees: the Protestants hurried out of the room.
Soon a new pulpit was erected in the palace; and, during Lent, a
series of sermons was preached there by Popish divines, to the great
discomposure of zealous churchmen. [251]

A more serious innovation followed. Passion week came; and the King
determined to hear mass with the same pomp with which his predecessors
had been surrounded when they repaired to the temples of the established
religion. He announced his intention to the three members of the
interior cabinet, and requested them to attend him. Sunderland, to
whom all religions were the same, readily consented. Godolphin, as
Chamberlain of the Queen, had already been in the habit of giving her
his hand when she repaired to her oratory, and felt no scruple about
bowing himself officially in the house of Rimmon. But Rochester was
greatly disturbed. His influence in the country arose chiefly from the
opinion entertained by the clergy and by the Tory gentry, that he was a
zealous and uncompromising friend of the Church. His orthodoxy had been
considered as fully atoning for fault