All this was done with the most rigid secrecy, with what is called royal promptitude, and with that mole-like silence recommended and practised by Bacon, and later on made law by Blackstone, for affairs connected with the Chancellorship and the state, and in matters termed parliamentary.  The jussu regis and the signature Jeffreys were authenticated.  To those who have studied pathologically the cases of caprice called “our good will and pleasure,” this jussu regis is very simple.  Why should James II., whose credit required the concealment of such acts, have allowed that to be written which endangered their success?  The answer is, cynicism—­haughty indifference.  Oh! you believe that effrontery is confined to abandoned women?  The raison d’etat is equally abandoned. Et se cupit ante videri.  To commit a crime and emblazon it, there is the sum total of history.  The king tattooes himself like the convict.  Often when it would be to a man’s greatest advantage to escape from the hands of the police or the records of history, he would seem to regret the escape so great is the love of notoriety.  Look at my arm!  Observe the design! I am Lacenaire!  See, a temple of love and a burning heart pierced through with an arrow! Jussu regis.  It is I, James the Second.  A man commits a bad action, and places his mark upon it.  To fill up the measure of crime by effrontery, to denounce himself, to cling to his misdeeds, is the insolent bravado of the criminal.  Christina seized Monaldeschi, had him confessed and assassinated, and said,—­

“I am the Queen of Sweden, in the palace of the King of France.”

There is the tyrant who conceals himself, like Tiberius; and the tyrant who displays himself, like Philip II.  One has the attributes of the scorpion, the other those rather of the leopard.  James II. was of this latter variety.  He had, we know, a gay and open countenance, differing so far from Philip.  Philip was sullen, James jovial.  Both were equally ferocious.  James II. was an easy-minded tiger; like Philip II., his crimes lay light upon his conscience.  He was a monster by the grace of God.  Therefore he had nothing to dissimulate nor to extenuate, and his assassinations were by divine right.  He, too, would not have minded leaving behind him those archives of Simancas, with all his misdeeds dated, classified, labelled, and put in order, each in its compartment, like poisons in the cabinet of a chemist.  To set the sign-manual to crimes is right royal.

Every deed done is a draft drawn on the great invisible paymaster.  A bill had just come due with the ominous endorsement, Jussu regis.

Queen Anne, in one particular unfeminine, seeing that she could keep a secret, demanded a confidential report of so grave a matter from the Lord Chancellor—­one of the kind specified as “report to the royal ear.”  Reports of this kind have been common in all monarchies.  At Vienna there was “a counsellor of the ear”—­an aulic dignitary.  It was an ancient Carlovingian office—­the auricularius of the old palatine deeds.  He who whispers to the emperor.