It has been judged necessary to detail these transactions in a manner which may, to some readers, appear an impertinent digression from the narrative in which this history is at present engaged, in order to set in a clearer light some points of the greatest importance.  In the first place, from the summary review of the affairs of Scotland, and from the complacency with which James looks back to his own share of them, joined to the general approbation he expressed of the conduct of government in that kingdom, we may form a pretty just notion, as well of his maxims of policy, as of his temper and disposition in matters where his bigotry to the Roman Catholic religion had no share.  For it is to be observed and carefully kept in mind, that the Church, of which he not only recommends the support, but which be showed himself ready to maintain by the most violent means, is the Episcopalian Church of the Protestants; that the test which he enforced at the point of the bayonet was a Protestant test, so much so indeed, that he himself could not take it; and that the more marked character of the conventicles, the objects of his persecution, was not so much that of heretics excommunicated by the Pope, as of dissenters from the Church of England, and irreconcilable enemies to the Protestant liturgy and the Protestant episcopacy.  But he judged the Church of England to be a most fit instrument for rendering the monarchy absolute.  On the other hand, the Presbyterians were thought naturally hostile to the principles of passive obedience, and to one or other, or with more probability to both of these considerations, joined to the natural violence of his temper, is to be referred the whole of his conduct in this part of his life, which in this view is rational enough; but on the supposition of his having conceived thus early the intention of introducing popery upon the ruins of the Church of England, is wholly unaccountable, and no less absurd, than if a general were to put himself to great cost and pains to furnish with ammunition and to strengthen with fortifications a place of which he was actually meditating the attack.

The next important observation that occurs, and to which even they who are most determined to believe that this prince had always popery in view, and held every other consideration as subordinate to that primary object, must nevertheless subscribe, is that the most confidential advisors, as well as the most furious supporters of the measures we have related, were not Roman Catholics.  Lauderdale and Queensbury were both Protestants.  There is no reason, therefore, to impute any of James’s violence afterwards to the suggestions of his Catholic advisers, since he who had been engaged in the series of measures above related with Protestant counsellors and coadjutors, had surely nothing to learn from papists (whether priests, jesuits, or others) in the science of tyranny.  Lastly, from this account we are enabled to form some notion of the state of Scotland at a time when the parliament of that kingdom was called to set an example for this, and we find it to have been a state of more absolute slavery than at that time subsisted in any part of Christendom.