Early in the year 1693, Middleton, having been put in full possession of the views of the principal English Jacobites, stole across the Channel, and made his appearance at the Court of James.  There was at that Court no want of slanderers and sneerers whose malignity was only the more dangerous because it wore a meek and sanctimonious air.  Middleton found, on his arrival, that numerous lies, fabricated by the priests who feared and hated him, were already in circulation.  Some Noncompounders too had written from London that he was at heart a Presbyterian and a republican.  He was however very graciously received, and was appointed Secretary of State conjointly with Melfort.430

It very soon appeared that James was fully resolved never to resign the Crown, or to suffer the Prince of Wales to be bred a heretic; and it long seemed doubtful whether any arguments or entreaties would induce him to sign the Declaration which his friends in England had prepared.  It was indeed a document very different from any that had yet appeared under his Great Seal.  He was made to promise that he would grant a free pardon to all his subjects who should not oppose him after he should land in the island; that, as soon as he was restored, he would call a Parliament; that he would confirm all such laws, passed during the usurpation, as the Houses should tender to him for confirmation; that he would waive his right to the chimney money; that he would protect and defend the Established Church in the enjoyment of all her possessions and privileges; that he would not again violate the Test Act; that he would leave it to the legislature to define the extent of his dispensing power; and that he would maintain the Act of Settlement in Ireland.

He struggled long and hard.  He pleaded his conscience.  Could a son of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church bind himself to protect and defend heresy, and to enforce a law which excluded true believers from office?  Some of the ecclesiastics who swarmed in his household told him that he could not without sin give any such pledge as his undutiful subjects demanded.  On this point the opinion of Middleton, who was a Protestant, could be of no weight.  But Middleton found an ally in one whom he regarded as a rival and an enemy.  Melfort, scared by the universal hatred of which he knew himself to be the object, and afraid that he should be held accountable, both in England and in France, for his master’s wrongheadedness, submitted the case to several eminent Doctors of the Sorbonne.  These learned casuists pronounced the Declaration unobjectionable in a religious point of view.  The great Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, who was regarded by the Gallican Church as a father scarcely inferior in authority to Cyprian or Augustin, showed, by powerful arguments, both theological and political, that the scruple which tormented James was precisely of that sort against which a much wiser King had given a caution in the words, “Be not