The truth is that the faults of James’s head and heart were incurable.  In his view there could be between him and his subjects no reciprocity of obligation.  Their duty was to risk property, liberty, life, in order to replace him on the throne, and then to bear patiently whatever he chose to inflict upon them.  They could no more pretend to merit before him than before God.  When they had done all, they were still unprofitable servants.  The highest praise due to the royalist who shed his blood on the field of battle or on the scaffold for hereditary monarchy was simply that he was not a traitor.  After all the severe discipline which the deposed King had undergone, he was still as much bent on plundering and abasing the Church of England as on the day when he told the kneeling fellows of Magdalene to get out of his sight, or on the day when he sent the Bishops to the Tower.  He was in the habit of declaring that he would rather die without seeing England again than stoop to capitulate with those whom he ought to command.427 In the Declaration of April 1692 the whole man appears without disguise, full of his own imaginary rights, unable to understand how any body but himself can have any rights, dull, obstinate and cruel.  Another paper which he drew up about the same time shows, if possible, still more clearly, how little he had profited by a sharp experience.  In that paper he set forth the plan according to which he intended to govern when he should be restored.  He laid it down as a rule that one Commissioner of the Treasury, one of the two Secretaries of State, the Secretary at War, the majority of the Great Officers of the Household, the majority of the Lords of the Bedchamber, the majority of the officers of the army, should always be Roman Catholics.428

It was to no purpose that the most eminent Compounders sent from London letter after letter filled with judicious counsel and earnest supplication.  It was to no purpose that they demonstrated in the plainest manner the impossibility of establishing Popish ascendancy in a country where at least forty-nine fiftieths of the population and much more than forty-nine fiftieths of the wealth and the intelligence were Protestant.  It was to no purpose that they informed their master that the Declaration of April 1692 had been read with exultation by his enemies and with deep affliction by his friends, that it had been printed and circulated by the usurpers, that it had done more than all the libels of the Whigs to inflame the nation against him, and that it had furnished those naval officers who had promised him support with a plausible pretext for breaking faith with him, and for destroying the fleet which was to have convoyed him back to his kingdom.  He continued to be deaf to the remonstrances of his best friends in England till those remonstrances began to be echoed at Versailles.  All the information which Lewis and his ministers were able to obtain touching the state of our island satisfied them that