s which would otherwise have made
him the most unpopular man in the kingdom, for boundless arrogance,
for extreme violence of temper, and for manners almost brutal. [252] He
feared that, by complying with the royal wishes, he should greatly
lower himself in the estimation of his party. After some altercation
he obtained permission to pass the holidays out of town. All the other
great civil dignitaries were ordered to be at their posts on Easter
Sunday. The rites of the Church of Rome were once more, after an
interval of a hundred and twenty-seven years, performed at Westminster
with regal splendour. The Guards were drawn out. The Knights of the
Garter wore their collars. The Duke of Somerset, second in rank among
the temporal nobles of the realm, carried the sword of state. A long
train of great lords accompanied the King to his seat. But it was
remarked that Ormond and Halifax remained in the antechamber. A few
years before they had gallantly defended the cause of James against some
of those who now pressed past them. Ormond had borne no share in the
slaughter of Roman Catholics. Halifax had courageously pronounced
Stafford not guilty. As the timeservers who had pretended to shudder at
the thought of a Popish king, and who had shed without pity the innocent
blood of a Popish peer, now elbowed each other to get near a Popish
altar, the accomplished Trimmer might, with some justice, indulge his
solitary pride in that unpopular nickname. [253]

Within a week after this ceremony James made a far greater sacrifice
of his own religious prejudices than he had yet called on any of his
Protestant subjects to make. He was crowned on the twenty-third of
April, the feast of the patron saint of the realm. The Abbey and the
Hall were splendidly decorated. The presence of the Queen and of the
peeresses gave to the solemnity a charm which had been wanting to the
magnificent inauguration of the late King. Yet those who remembered that
inauguration pronounced that there was a great falling off. The ancient
usage was that, before a coronation, the sovereign, with all his
heralds, judges, councillors, lords, and great dignitaries, should ride
in state from the Tower of Westminster. Of these cavalcades the last and
the most glorious was that which passed through the capital while the
feelings excited by the Restoration were still in full vigour. Arches of
triumph overhung the road. All Cornhill, Cheapside, Saint Paul's Church
Yard, Fleet S