only story that has been made of me; and I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in Church and State, as it is now by law established.  I know the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy, and the members of it have shown themselves good and loyal subjects; therefore I shall always take care to defend and support it.  I know, too, that the laws of England are sufficient to make the king as great a monarch as I can wish; and as I shall never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the crown, so I shall never invade any man’s property.  I have often heretofore ventured my life in defence of this nation and I shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties.”

With this declaration the council were so highly satisfied, that they supplicated his majesty to make it public, which was accordingly done; and it is reported to have been received with unbounded applause by the greater part of the nation.  Some, perhaps, there were, who did not think the boast of having ventured his life very manly, and who, considering the transactions of the last years of Charles’s reign, were not much encouraged by the promise of imitating that monarch in clemency and tenderness to his subjects.  To these it might appear, that whatever there was of consolatory in the king’s disclaimer of arbitrary power and professed attachment to the laws, was totally done away, as well by the consideration of what his majesty’s notions of power and law were, as by his declaration that he would follow the example of a predecessor, whose government had not only been marked with the violation, in particular cases, of all the most sacred laws of the realm, but had latterly, by the disuse of parliaments, in defiance of the statute of the sixteenth year of his reign, stood upon a foundation radically and fundamentally illegal.  To others it might occur that even the promise to the Church of England, though express with respect to the condition of it, which was no other than perfect acquiescence in what the king deemed to be the true principles of monarchy, was rather vague with regard to the nature or degree of support to which the royal speaker might conceive himself engaged.  The words, although in any interpretation of them they conveyed more than he possibly ever intended to perform, did by no means express the sense which at that time, by his friends, and afterwards by his enemies, was endeavoured to be fixed on them.  There was, indeed, a promise to support the establishment of the Church, and consequently the laws upon which that establishment immediately rested; but by no means an engagement to maintain all the collateral provisions which some of its more zealous members might judge necessary for its security.