During the next nine years the struggle between the king and the Parliament continued. The popular leader was Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury—for some time Chancellor—whose character has been delineated by Dryden with merciless severity, but with substantial accuracy, in "Absalom and Achitophel". This statesman's own Protestantism was of the haziest kind, but he was zealous, from political motives, for the national religion, and for that reason was bent upon excluding the Duke of York from the succession to the throne. To accomplish this end, he fought strenuously, unremittingly, nor was any weapon too vile for his use. The Second Test Act, passed through his exertions in 1678, rendered Catholics incapable of sitting in Parliament, and thus deprived twenty-one Catholic peers of their seats in the House of Lords; but the king contrived to procure the insertion of a clause exempting the Duke of York from the operation of the Statute. It was in this same year that Titus Oates appeared on the scene with his pretended Popish Plot. There is no evidence that Ashley was the instigator of the colossal villainy, but he did not scruple to employ it for his own purposes. "The origin of the Plot", says a recent well-informed writer in "Blackwood's Magazine" (May, 1908), "is a mystery. We know no more than that the English people, being mad, interrupted the course of justice, insisted that the judges should condemn every man brought before them, suspected of papistry, and easily believed the crazy stories of hired perjurers. It is most probable that Oates himself contrived the death of Sir Edmund Godfrey." However that may have been, certain it is that the calumnies of Oates and his confederates and imitators awakened the Elizabethan Statutes into fresh activity. The king was far too shrewd to give credence to what Macaulay has well called "a hideous romance resembling rather the dream of a sick man than any transaction which ever took place in this world." But he was powerless to save the victims of popular fanaticism; "I cannot pardon them", he said, "for I dare not." And so, in 1679, the horrors of 1588 were repeated, eight priests of the Society of Jesus, two Franciscans, five secular priests, and seven laymen being put to death, while many more died in their foul prisons. The next year witnessed the judicial murder of Lord Stafford, his peers being unable to withstand the madness of the people. In 1681 Oliver Plunket, the Archbishop of Armagh, was executed at Tyburn, after a mock trial. His was the last blood shed for the Catholic religion in England. The persecution, which had begun with the execution of the three saintly Carthusian friars in the twenty-sixth year of Henry VIII, had lasted, with little intermission, for a century and a half. Three hundred and forty-two martyrs had sealed their faith with their blood, while some fifty confessors, in the reign of Elizabeth and her successors, ended their lives in prison. The king's long struggle with the popular party ended in his complete victory. No more consummate master of political strategy ever perhaps existed; and the violence of the party led by Shaftesbury played into his hands. Shaftesbury himself was arrested on a charge of suborning false witnesses to the Plot; although the Grand Jury of Middlesex ignored the bill of his indictment, he saw that the tide of popular feeling, which had begun to ebb with the execution of Lord Stafford, was now turned completely against him, and at the end of 1682 he fled to Holland, where, two months afterwards, he died.
Charles II was the most popular of kings during the last two years of his reign, and he was careful not to mar his popularity by illegal acts or by measures opposed to the feeling of the nation. The statute for the regulation of printing, passed immediately after the Restoration, had expired in 1679; Charles made no attempt for its renewal. In the same year the Habeas Corpus Act—that great charter of the liberty of the subject—was passed; Charles acquiesced in it. He did indeed infringe the Test Act by the Duke of York's readmission to the Council and restoration to the office of lord high admiral. But, in the recrudescence of loyalty, this tribute to fraternal affection passed unblamed. In his last illness the churches were thronged with crowds praying that God would raise him up again to be a father to his people; and on his death, in February, 1685, all sorts and conditions of his subjects made great lamentation over him.
In the first year of the reign of James II Dr. Leyburn was appointed by the Holy See as vicar Apostolic. In the next year Dr. Giffard received a like appointment, as did Dr. Ellis and Dr. Smith the year after that, England being divided into four districts: the London, the Midland, the Western, and the Northern, in each of which the papal vicar exercised all the authority possessed by an ordinary. The new king came to the throne with advantages which he could hardly have hoped for. He inherited, in some sort, the popularity of his brother, and his religion was forgotten in his blood. He began his reign by a solemn pledge to keep the laws inviolate and to protect the Church of England, and the nation believed him. "We have the word of a king", it was said, "and of a king who was never worse than his word." The saying, whoever was its author, went abroad. It expressed the general conviction, and his first Parliament made proof of exuberant loyalty, granting to the monarch, without demur, a revenue of nearly two millions for life. Argyll's rebellion in the North and Monmouth's in the West but served to bring out the devotion of the nation at large to the sovereign. But the cruelties of Kirke and the savageries of Jeffreys in the "Bloody Circuit" caused a change in the general feeling. The king's popularity began to wane, and the measures to which he now resorted soon put an end to it. Monmouth's revolt was made the pretext for raising the army to twenty thousand men, and it soon appeared that James supposed himself able, with this force at his command, to place himself above the law. He attempted to nullify the provisions of statutes by the exercise of his dispensing power. Judges who refused to fall in with his plans were dismissed; and it was held by a bench packed with his creatures that his dispensation could be pleaded in bar of an Act of Parliament. Armed with this decision, the king proceeded to set aside the disabilities of Catholics and the restraints upon the exercise of their religion. They were admitted to civil and military offices closed to them by the law; members of religious orders appeared in the streets of London in their habits; the Jesuits opened a school which was soon crowded. Further, the king found himself ex officio supreme head of the Anglican Communion, and he resolved to use his supremacy as a weapon for its overthrow. Following the precedent of Elizabeth, he appointed an Ecclesiastical Commission, in defiance of an Act of Charles I which declared that court illegal; and he placed Jeffreys at the head of it. He forbade the clergy to preach against popery, and suspended the Bishop of London for refusing to carry out this order. At Oxford he presented a Catholic to the deanery of Christ Church and converted Magdalen College into a Catholic society. Among English Catholics most men of reputation stood aghast at this reckless violence. Few approved it but converts of broken fortune and tarnished reputation. Rome gave no countenance to it. Macaulay is absolutely warranted in writing: "Every letter which went from the Vatican to Whitehall recommended patience, moderation and respect for the prejudices of the English people". "The Pope", he observes in another page, with equal justice, "was too wise a man to believe that a nation so bold and stubborn could be brought back to the Church of Rome by the violent and unconstitutional exercise of the royal authority. It was not difficult to
