ey serve only to aggravate the charge against him. James
was become a great patron of toleration, and an enemy to all those
persecuting laws which, from the influence of the church, had been
enacted both against the dissenters and Catholics. Not content with
granting dispensations to particular persons, he assumed a power of
issuing a declaration of general indulgence, and of suspending at
once all the penal statutes by which a conformity was required to
the established religion. This was a strain of authority, it must be
confessed, quite inconsistent with law and a limited constitution; yet
was it supported by many strong precedents in the history of England.
Even after the principles of liberty were become more prevalent, and
began to be well understood, the late king had, oftener than once, and
without giving much umbrage, exerted this dangerous power: he had, in
1662, suspended the execution of a law which regulated carriages: during
the two Dutch wars, he had twice suspended the act of navigation: and
the commons, in 1666, being resolved, contrary to the king's judgment,
to enact that iniquitous law against the importation of Irish
cattle, found it necessary, in order to obviate the exercise of this
prerogative, which they desired not at that time entirely to deny or
abrogate, to call that importation a nuisance.

Though the former authority of the sovereign was great in civil affairs,
it was still greater in ecclesiastical; and the whole despotic power
of the popes was often believed, in virtue of the supremacy, to have
devolved to the crown. The last parliament of Charles I., by abolishing
the power of the king and convocation to frame canons without consent
of parliament, had somewhat diminished the supposed extent of the
supremacy; but still very considerable remains of it, at least very
important claims, were preserved, and were occasionally made use of
by the sovereign. In 1662, Charles, pleading both the rights of his
supremacy and his suspending power, had granted a general indulgence
or toleration; and, in 1672, he renewed the same edict: though the
remonstrances of his parliament obliged him, on both occasions, to
retract; and, in the last instance, the triumph of law over prerogative
was deemed very great and memorable. In general, we may remark that,
where the exercise of the suspending power was agreeable and useful,
the power itself was little questioned: where the exercise was thought
liable to excep