as the centre of its
national independence. Only the tie was a personal one; much in the same
way as the Pope had been far more than an embodied symbol of Church
authority. The sovereign represented the people, but no one then spoke
of 'sovereignty residing in the whole body of the people,'[104] or
dreamt of asserting that the supremacy of the King was a fiction,
meaning only the supremacy of the three estates.[105] So it long
continued, especially in the Church. Ecclesiastical is ever wont to lag
somewhat in the rear of political improvement. In the State, the
personal supremacy of the sovereign, though a very strong reality in the
hands of the Tudors, had been tutored into a moderately close conformity
with the wishes of the popular representatives. In the Church, the same
process was going on, but it was a far more gradual one; and the spirit
of loyal deference which long remained unaltered in the one, gained
increasing strength in the other. Upon the reaction which succeeded
after the Commonwealth, the Church, as it had been ever faithful to the
royal fortunes in their time of reverse, shared to the full in the
effusion with which the nation in general greeted the return of
monarchy, and was more than ever dazzled by the 'divinity which hedges
round a King.' But under James II., the Church had cause to feel the
perils of arbitrary power as keenly, or even more keenly than the nation
in its civil capacity. By a remarkable leading of events, the foremost
of the High Church bishops found themselves, amid the acclamations of
the multitude, in the very van of a resistance which was indeed in a
sense passive, but which plainly paved the way to active resistance on
the part of others, and which, as they must themselves have felt,
strained to the utmost that doctrine of passive obedience which was
still dear to them as ever. Some even of the most earnest champions of
the divine right of kings were at last compelled to imagine
circumstances under which the tenet would cease to be tenable. What if
James should propose to hand over Ireland to France as the price of help
against his own people? Ken, it is said, acknowledged that under such a
contingency he should feel wholly released from his allegiance.

The revolution of 1688 dissipated the halo which had shed a fictitious
light round the throne. Queen Anne may have flattered herself that it
was already reviving. George I. in his first speech to parliament laid
claim to the a