danger of resistance.  He quite forgot that, when they magnified the royal prerogative, the prerogative was exerted on their side, that, when they preached endurance, they had nothing to endure, that, when they declared it unlawful to resist evil, none but Whigs and Dissenters suffered any evil.  It had never occurred to him that a man feels the calamities of his enemies with one sort of sensibility, and his own with quite a different sort.  It had never occurred to him as possible that a reverend divine might think it the duty of Baxter and Bunyan to bear insults and to lie in dungeons without murmuring, and yet when he saw the smallest chance that his own prebend might be transferred to some sly Father from Italy or Flanders, might begin to discover much matter for useful meditation in the texts touching Ehud’s knife and Jael’s hammer.  His majesty was not aware, it should seem, that people do sometimes reconsider their opinions; and that nothing more disposes a man to reconsider his opinions, than a suspicion, that, if he adheres to them, he is very likely to be a beggar or a martyr.  Yet it seems strange that these truths should have escaped the royal mind.  Those Churchmen who had signed the Oxford Declaration in favour of passive obedience had also signed the thirty-nine Articles.  And yet the very man who confidently expected that, by a little coaxing and bullying, he should induce them to renounce the Articles, was thunderstruck when he found that they were disposed to soften down the doctrines of the Declaration.  Nor did it necessarily follow that, even if the theory of the Tories had undergone no modification, their practice would coincide with their theory.  It might, one should think, have crossed the mind of a man of fifty, who had seen a great deal of the world, that people sometimes do what they think wrong.  Though a prelate might hold that Paul directs us to obey even a Nero, it might not on that account be perfectly safe to treat the Right Reverend Father in God after the fashion of Nero, in the hope that he would continue to obey on the principles of Paul.  The King indeed had only to look at home.  He was at least as much attached to the Catholic Church as any Tory gentleman or clergyman could be to the Church of England.  Adultery was at least as clearly and strongly condemned by his Church as resistance by the Church of England.  Yet his priests could not keep him from Arabella Sedley.  While he was risking his crown for the sake of his soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress.  There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside from the path of virtue.

James was disappointed in all his calculations.  His hope was that the Tories would follow their principles, and that the Nonconformists would follow their interests.  Exactly the reverse took place.  The great body of the Tories sacrificed the principle of non-resistance to their interests; the great body of Nonconformists rejected the delusive offers of the King, and stood firmly by their principles.  The two parties whose strife had convulsed the empire during half a century were united for a moment; and all that vast royal power which three years before had seemed immovably fixed vanished at once like chaff in a hurricane.