things take their course.  He gave way to the violence of the movement, and waited for the corresponding violence of the rebound.  He exhibited himself to his subjects in the interesting character of an oppressed king, who was ready to do anything to please them, and who asked of them, in return, only some consideration for his conscientious scruples and for his feelings of natural affection, who was ready to accept any ministers, to grant any guarantees to public liberty, but who could not find it in his heart to take away his brother’s birthright.  Nothing more was necessary.  He had to deal with a people whose noble weakness it has always been not to press too hardly on the vanquished, with a people the lowest and most brutal of whom cry “Shame!” if they see a man struck when he is on the ground.  The resentment which the nation bad felt towards the Court began to abate as soon as the Court was manifestly unable to offer any resistance.  The panic which Godfrey’s death had excited gradually subsided.  Every day brought to light some new falsehood or contradiction in the stories of Oates and Bedloe.  The people were glutted with the blood of Papists, as they had, twenty years before, been glutted with the blood of regicides.  When the first sufferers in the plot were brought to the bar, the witnesses for the defence were in danger of being torn in pieces by the mob.  Judges, jurors, and spectators seemed equally indifferent to justice, and equally eager for revenge.  Lord Stafford, the last sufferer, was pronounced not guilty by a large minority of his peers; and when he protested his innocence on the scaffold, the people cried out, “God bless you, my lord; we believe you, my lord.”  The attempt to make a son of Lucy Waters King of England was alike offensive to the pride of the nobles and to the moral feeling of the middle class.  The old Cavalier party, the great majority of the landed gentry, the clergy and the universities almost to a man, began to draw together, and to form in close array round the throne.

A similar reaction had begun to take place in favour of Charles the First during the second session of the Long Parliament; and, if that prince had been honest or sagacious enough to keep himself strictly within the limits of the law, we have not the smallest doubt that he would in a few months have found himself at least as powerful as his best friends, Lord Falkland, Culpeper, or Hyde, would have wished to see him.  By illegally impeaching the leaders of the Opposition, and by making in person a wicked attempt on the House of Commons, he stopped and turned back that tide of loyal feeling which was just beginning to run strongly.  The son, quite as little restrained by law or by honour as the father, was, luckily for himself, a man of a lounging, careless temper, and, from temper, we believe, rather than from policy, escaped that great error which cost the father so dear.  Instead of trying to pluck the fruit before it was ripe, he lay still till it fell mellow into his very mouth.  If he had arrested Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Russell in a manner not warranted by law, it is not improbable that he would have ended his life in exile.  He took the sure course.  He employed only his legal prerogatives, and he found them amply sufficient for his purpose.