down the honest independency of action in royalty. The education scheme may be made one of the most powerful engines for the propagation of priestly arbitrary principles that this kingdom ever knew. The Church of England ruined James II., which should be a warning to all future sovereigns never to allow ruin to proceed from such a cause again; and the safest way is to break up at once any scheme, whatever called, which may be screwed up to subserve the arbitrary power of the Church of England, enslave the throne, or uproot all civil as well as religious liberty within these realms. The Privy Council education scheme is as unconstitutional as it is dangerous to religious and civil liberty.

Poor James!-actually flattered out of his throne, to make room for a stranger! What a warning to kings this should be-and to people too!-for this flattery, if pushed forward by all the slow progression of the tortoise, might end in utter ruin to both king and people. The priest flatters-for what? For power; power second, if not sufficiently strong to obtain power first; or, as Locke says, "that prince and priest may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipped together as divine in the same temple by us poor lay subjects; and that sense and reason, law, properties, rights, and liberties, shall be understood as the oracles of those deities shall interpret or give signification to them, and never be made use of in the world to oppose the absolute and free will of either of them."

De Foe, in his Review, vol. vii. p. 304, states, that "It was for many years together, and I am witness to it, that the pulpit sounded nothing but the duty of absolute submission, obedience without reserve, subjection to princes as God's vicegerents, accountable to none, to be withstood in nothing, and by no person. I have heard it publicly preached that if the King commanded my head, and sent his messengers to fetch it, I was bound to submit, and stand still while it was cut off. I forbear to repeat the foolish extravagances that these things ran up to. There are too many books still extant of the same kind. Let any man but read a few of L'Estrange's Observators, Toleration Discussed, Thompson's Rule of Allegiance, the History of Divine Right, and many other volumes of that age, and particularly the addresses of the corporations, &c., in those days called

loyal, and he shall find the absurdest and the most ridiculous notions that ever Protestant nation was wheedled into. And what was the

He

effect of this? The cheat was fatal two ways. Had those that preached it been sincere-had they been the fools they made the King believe they would be-we had all been undone, our liberties had been sacrificed, our laws made to truckle to the will of the most arbitrary tyrant, and our parliaments made tools to the pleasure of the Prince, like the Protestants of France; for the elections, by the new modelling the corporations, were all coming into his own hand. These were the steps one side drove at, but the mistake lay another way the thing was a cheat, and the King fell into the snare. thought he had brought them to his beck, and the first touch he gave them of the practice, they flew in his face, called in foreign help, took arms against God's vicegerent, unswore all their allegiance to him, and drove him out of the kingdom. This they now handsomely expressed by vigorous and successful withstanding arbitrary power; and the words are copious indeed in their meaning-fully expressive of all that happened between the landing of the Prince of Orange and the Revolution."

The High-Church party always considered Charles I. to be a martyr, and what De Foe allowed and termed a wet martyr; James being a martyr too, and for distinction's sake termed a dry martyr. Henrietta, the Queen of the first, might be the principal cause of the one martyrdom, while the unprincipled conduct of the clergy of the Church of England was certainly the cause of the other.

After a good deal of squaring of consciences to make different sorts of oaths fit, such as de-facto allegiance oaths, and jure-divino allegiance oaths, the poor mortified clergy set themselves to consider what should square with their interests in the monopoly of all the good things of this life, to the exclusion of this or that brother, who thought this or that on certain tenets of doctrine or discipline. So the old feeling of persecution of Dissenters revived in all its vigour; and although the Bill of Rights, founded upon the Prince of Orange's Declaration of Rights, afforded all the principles of freedom of action in religious matters, yet the spirit of religious equality was absent from the breasts of the clergy of the

Established Church. The vitality of Protestantism-the great bulwark of national England-was absent; there was still left the spirit of persecution in the breasts of the clergy.

The Bill of Rights passed in the first session of William and Mary, 1689, and is the Magna Charta of our religious equalities. De Foe, speaking of this measure in his Review (vol. ii. 147), says, "The Declaration of Rights of the people of England has stabbed all sorts of civil tyranny to the heart; and the English monarchy, under the present just and legal administration, is perfectly purged and abstracted from all that ever the Dissenters complained of. I know but one thing left that we have to ask of the government— the abolition of tests, sacraments, and religious obligations at our admission to trusts in the government."

The Bill of Rights is the grand charter by which the sovereigns of this country should take their rule; and stir up and keep alive through the length and breadth of this empire, for the sake of the national safety; vigorously to be kept in working health by the vitality of Protestantism—a vitality which can alone be supported by the strict observance of a principle of religious equality.

Any infringement of the rights of equality in Protestantism is a weakening of the resisting force; to be applied, if necessary, against the inroads of the arbitrary powers of continental Europe. There are pluralities in our church—this is a robbing of the parish for the sake of the parson-where is the Bill of Rights? Away with this! for it is a great source of weakness in the vitality of Protestantism.

After the heterogeneous mass of opposing interests, those of the real patriots on the one hand, and the affrighted vested interests on the other, things began to fall into their old channel; and so, on the 29th of October, 1689, their Majesties accepted an invitation given by the citizens of London at the Guildhall, when Sir Thomas Pilkington, a great champion for the people's rights and liberties, was knighted. On this occasion great efforts were made by certain well-wishers to their Majesties to give every support to the demonstration; a guard of honour was formed for the occasion, which was placed under the command of the Earl of Peterborough, and was especially a royal body-guard of honour to their Majesties' persons, and was composed,

for the most part, of Protestant dissenters, they being, in heart and soul, the honest supporters and abettors of the glorious Revolution of 1688.

Amongst these mounted champions of revolution, and not far from the King's person, was espied by the keen-eyed Oldmixon, Foe, the hosier of Freeman's Court, Cornhill. Oldmixon, looking for a flaw in this new development of regal power and pomp, could not allow the procession to wend its slow length along the crowded streets, but he must spy out the weakest point, and proclaim it to the world in his next weekly paper, the Observator, and show by his detracting pen the low company royalty had been seen allied with, when proceeding to these civic metropolitan festivities.

It may safely be declared that there was not one man in the whole British empire more enthusiastically devoted to the letter and the spirit of the glorious Revolution of 1688 than Daniel De Foe; for during the whole process of this political birth he was as one demented with joy and expectation: he supported the movement by his pen and by his person; he was a constant attendant upon the House of Commons on all important discussions, and, as opportunity offered, poured out, as few but himself could pour out, monthly, weekly, or daily, if required, the fundamental principles of the British constitution, and demonstrated the hollowness of preaching a doctrine of adulation and obsequiousness, the doctrine of passive obedience to all kings-a doctrine based upon self, for the supplying the growing wants and desires of pride. Self and pride lay at the bottom of all the juredivino doctrines preached to confiding mortals from the church pulpits at this time; for the jure-divino text was only applicable to prosperous times, or so long as we and ours stood all well with royalty.

De Foe at this time again and again pointed out that the Church of England was passive obedient altogether, only so long as James the Second did not attempt to interfere with its revenues; but when the pluralities and endowments were threatened by a royal interference, passive-obedience principles and devotion to the house of Stuart were wafted into nothingness at once-they ceased to exist; and the result was, that the rotten, unprincipled clerical support was thrown into the scale of the glorious-revolution advocacy for the

time, but only for the time, for the support was rotten in principle: it was only a support founded upon panic and disappointment. But such as it was, it was temporarily at William's service, and he availed himself of it; and thus the adulatory supporters of the base house of Stuart became the main instruments in the hands of William Prince of Orange for getting rid of James II., the corrupt tool and pensioner of Louis XIV. of France, and his minister, Cardinal Mazarin.

Poor James II.! his father married a fool, and, as poor Ebenezer Elliott would say, "all t' childer braided after t'mother." The French-Italian connection, Henrietta, the daughter of Henry IV. of France, was a serious misfortune to the house of Stuart-a match which imported into the royal family of Britain the most tyrannical, profligate blood of the worst family of Italy, the Medici of Florence, making James II., Charles II., and the Duchess of Orleans, greatgrandchildren of Catherine de Medici of Florence, and afterwards of France-the worst woman that this world ever knew since the times of the Roman emperors; for there were few empresses of Rome equal to Catherine de Medici of Paris, both for murder and lust.

Although the Henrietta importation was disastrous to the Stuarts, I have the impression that another match made by the Stuarts previous to the time of Henrietta, had much to do with the self-will, instability, rashness, want of caution, and courage without prudence, of this family. This is my impression, taken from the picture gallery at Hampton Court, and taken from there only. I allude to Ann of Denmark, the wife of James I., and mother of Charles I.

It would be rather a curious and interesting study in the picture galleries of Italy, Denmark, and France to trace the origin of the external forms of body of Charles I., Charles II., and James II. Perhaps Denmark and Florence might divide the honours between them. I believe Italy would claim the second Charles and the second James, as her own, without any disputing. On James I.'s prospect of forming respectable matches for his children, he must show himself worthy of the connection; for to the Roman Catholic Spain he must sacrifice the whole power of principle and thought, lay and clerical, in the Church of England, by ordering a foolish, silly