laid claim, that he would not again, in defiance of the plainest statutes, fill the Privy Council, the bench of justice, the public offices, the army, the navy, with Papists, that he would not reestablish the High Commission, that he would not appoint a new set of regulators to remodel all the constituent bodies of the kingdom.  He did indeed condescend to say that he would maintain the legal rights of the Church of England; but he had said this before; and all men knew what those words meant in his mouth.  Instead of assuring his people of his forgiveness, he menaced them with a proscription more terrible than any which our island had ever seen.  He published a list of persons who had no mercy to expect.  Among these were Ormond, Caermarthen, Nottingham, Tillotson and Burnet.  After the roll of those who were doomed to death by name, came a series of categories.  First stood all the crowd of rustics who had been rude to His Majesty when he was stopped at Sheerness in his flight.  These poor ignorant wretches, some hundreds in number, were reserved for another bloody circuit.  Then came all persons who had in any manner borne a part in the punishment of any Jacobite conspirator; judges, counsel, witnesses, grand jurymen, petty jurymen, sheriffs and undersheriffs, constables and turnkeys, in short, all the ministers of justice from Holt down to Ketch.  Then vengeance was denounced against all spies and all informers who had divulged to the usurpers the designs of the Court of Saint Germains.  All justices of the peace who should not declare for their rightful Sovereign the moment that they heard of his landing, all gaolers who should not instantly set political prisoners at liberty, were to be left to the extreme rigour of the law.  No exception was made in favour of a justice or of a gaoler who might be within a hundred yards of one of William’s regiments, and a hundred miles from the nearest place where there was a single Jacobite in arms.

It might have been expected that James, after thus denouncing vengeance against large classes of his subjects, would at least have offered a general amnesty to the rest.  But of general amnesty he said not a word.  He did indeed promise that any offender who was not in any of the categories of proscription, and who should by any eminent service merit indulgence, should receive a special pardon.  But, with this exception, all the offenders, hundreds of thousands in number, were merely informed that their fate should be decided in Parliament.

The agents of James speedily dispersed his Declaration over every part of the kingdom, and by doing so rendered a great service to William.  The general cry was that the banished oppressor had at least given Englishmen fair warning, and that, if, after such a warning, they welcomed him home, they would have no pretence for complaining, though every county town should be polluted by an assize resembling that which Jeffreys had held at Taunton.  That some hundreds of people,—­the