During the first eighteen or nineteen years of his reign, he had been playing the game of his enemies.  From 1678 to 1681 his enemies had played his game.  They owed their power to his misgovernment.  He owed the recovery of his power to their violence.  The great body of the people came back to him after their estrangement with impetuous affection.  He had scarcely been more popular when he landed on the coast of Kent than when, after several years of restraint and humiliation, he dissolved his last Parliament.

Nevertheless, while this flux and reflux of opinion went on, the cause of public liberty was steadily gaining.  There had been a great reaction in favour of the throne at the Restoration.  But the Star-Chamber, the High Commission, the Ship-money, had for ever disappeared.  There was now another similar reaction.  But the Habeas Corpus Act had been passed during the short predominance of the Opposition, and it was not repealed.

The King, however, supported as he was by the nation, was quite strong enough to inflict a terrible revenge on the party which had lately held him in bondage.  In 1681 commenced the third of those periods in which we have divided the history of England from the Restoration to the Revolution.  During this period a third great reaction took place.  The excesses of tyranny restored to the cause of liberty the hearts which had been alienated from that cause by the excesses of faction.  In 1681, the King had almost all his enemies at his feet.  In 1688, the King was an exile in a strange land.

The whole of that machinery which had lately been in motion against the Papists was now put in motion against the Whigs, browbeating judges, packed juries, lying witnesses, clamorous spectators.  The ablest chief of the party fled to a foreign country and died there.  The most virtuous man of the party was beheaded.  Another of its most distinguished members preferred a voluntary death to the shame of a public execution.  The boroughs on which the Government could not depend were, by means of legal quibbles, deprived of their charters; and their constitution was remodelled in such a manner as almost to ensure the return of representatives devoted to the Court.  All parts of the kingdom emulously sent up the most extravagant assurances of the love which they bore to their sovereign, and of the abhorrence with which they regarded those who questioned the divine origin or the boundless extent of his power.  It is scarcely necessary to say that, in this hot competition of bigots and staves, the University of Oxford had the unquestioned pre-eminence.  The glory of being further behind the age than any other portion of the British people, is one which that learned body acquired early, and has never lost.