Page:History of England (Macaulay) Vol 2.djvu/384

incapable of holding any other preferment, and charged with the costs of the proceedings which had reduced him to beggary. Such was the persecution with which James, smarting from his great defeat in Westminster Hall, resolved to harass the clergy. Meanwhile he tried to show the lawyers, by a prompt and large distribution of rewards and punishments, that strenuous and unblushing servility, even when least successful, was a sure title to his favour, and that whoever, after years of obsequiousness, ventured to deviate but for one moment into courage and honesty was guilty of an unpardonable offence. The violence and audacity which the apostate Williams had exhibited throughout the trial of the Bishops had made him hateful to the whole nation.^[1] He was recompensed with a baronetcy. Holloway and Powell had raised their character by declaring that, in their judgment, the petition was no libel. They were dismissed from their situations.^[2] The fate of Wright seems to have been, during some time, in suspense. He had indeed summed up against the Bishops: but he had suffered their counsel to question the dispensing power. He had pronounced the petition a libel: but he had carefully abstained from pronouncing the Declaration legal; and, through the whole proceeding, his tone had been that of a man who remembered that a day of reckoning might come. He had indeed strong claims to indulgence: for it was hardly to be expected that any human impudence would hold out without flagging through such a task in the presence of such a bar and of such an auditory. The members of the Jesuitical cabal, however, blamed his want of spirit; the Chancellor pronounced him a beast; and it was generally believed that a new Chief Justice would be appointed.^[3] But no change was made. It would indeed have been no easy matter to supply Wright's place. The many lawyers who were far superior

1. In one of the numerous ballads of that time are the following lines:
   "Both our Britons are fooled,
   Who the laws overruled,
   And next parliament each will he plaguily schooled."
   
   
   The two Britons are Jeffreys and Williams, who were both natives of Wales.
2. London Gazette, July 9, 1688.
3. Ellis Correspondence, July 10, 1688; Clarendon's Diary, Aug. 3, 1688.