Encouraged by his success, James conceived that he might safely begin
the process of changing the established religion of the country. On
the plea of his supremacy over the church, he took the liberty of
dispensing with the test-oath in favor of some Catholic officers, and
thus broke an act which was looked upon, under existing circumstances,
as the chief safeguard of the Protestant faith. His Parliament,
servile as it was in temporal matters, took the alarm at this
spiritual danger, and gave the king so effectual a resistance that he
resorted to a dissolution. Transactions precisely similar took place
in Scotland.
Heedless of these symptoms, he proclaimed a universal toleration, for
the purpose of relieving the Catholics, and thus assumed the
unconstitutional right of dispensing with acts of Parliament. The
nation was thrown by this measure, and by the numerous promotions of
Roman Catholics, into a state of great alarm; even the clergy, who had
been so eager to preach an implicit obedience to the royal will, began
to see that it might be productive of much danger. When James
commanded that his proclamation of toleration should be read in every
pulpit in the country, only two hundred of the clergy obeyed. Six of
the bishops joined in a respectful petition against the order; but the
king declared that document to be a seditious libel, and threw the
petitioners into the Tower. In June 1688, they were tried in
Westminster Hall, and to the infinite joy of the nation acquitted.
Blinded by religious zeal, the king proceeded on his fatal course. In
defiance of the law, he held open intercourse with the Pope, for the
restoration of Britain to the bosom of the Romish church. He called
Catholic lords to the privy-council, and even placed some in the
cabinet. Chapels, by his instigation, were everywhere built, and monks
and priests went openly about his palace. A court of high
commission――a cruel instrument of power under Charles I――was erected,
and before this every clerical person who gave any offense to the king
was summoned. He also excited great indignation, by violently
thrusting a Catholic upon Magdalen College, at Oxford, as its head,
and expelling the members for their resistance to his will. Public
feelings was wound to the highest pitch of excitement by the queen
being delivered (June 10, 1688) of a son, who might be expected to
perpetuate the Catholic religion in the country, and whom many even
went the length of suspecting to be a suppositious child, brought
forward solely for that purpose.
The disaffection produced by these circumstances extended to every
class of the king’s subjects, except the small body of Roman
Catholics, many of whom could not help regarding the royal measures as
imprudent. The Tories were enraged at the ruin threatened to the
church of England, which they regarded as the grand support of
conservative principles in the empire. The Whigs, who had already made
many strenuous efforts to exclude or expel the king, were now more
inflamed against him than ever. The clergy, a popular and influential
body, were indignant at the injuries inflicted upon their church; and
even the dissenters, though comprehended in the general toleration,
saw too clearly through its motive, and were too well convinced of the
illegality of its manner, and of the danger of its object, as
affecting the Protestant faith, to be exempted from the general
sentiment. But for the birth of the Prince of Wales, the people at
large might have been contented to wait for the relief which was to be
expected, after the death of the king, from the succession of the
Princess of Orange, who was a Protestant, and united to the chief
military defender of that interest in Europe. But this hope was now
shut out, and it was necessary to resolve upon some decisive measures
for the safety of the national religion.