water, from which the mayor and aldermen came in their robes to greet him. Crowds of peasants still flocked from furrow and shaft to his standard, making dreadful weapons by tying scythes on long poles. On the other hand, the train-bands in all the surrounding counties were gathering under their lord-lieutenants. The Duke of Beaufort occupied Bristol with the well-drilled men of Gloucestershire. Churchill with the Life Guards Blue hung on the skirts of the rebel force as it advanced. Feversham was hourly pushing the main body of the royal army nearer to the scene of peril. Monmouth's first intention was to seize Bristol; and he had reached Keynsham bridge, on the Avon, when the defeat of his cavalry by a troop of Life Guards forced him to turn in the direction of Wiltshire. When he reached Frome, he found the people disarmed and unable to afford him help. Anxious to avoid a battle if possible, he made his way with drooping heart back to Bridgewater by way of Wells, arriving there on Thursday the 2nd of July.

The battle of Sedgemoor was fought early on the following

July 6, 1685

Monday morning. At eleven o'clock on the Sunday night, Monmouth rode out at the head of his foot-soldiers under the light of a full moon. Grey led the horse. The object of the movement was to surprise the royal army, which lay in three detached portions among the villages on the moor. Feversham was known to be a languid and incapable officer. Churchill commanded under him, but he was not taken into the counsels of his general. An accidental circumstance saved the royal army from destruction. The work of drainage having begun on the plain, Monmouth was obliged to take into account various rhines or broad ditches, when shaping out his plan of battle. He calculated on crossing two, which guarded the approaches to the royal lines, but did not know of a third-the Bussex Rhine-which accordingly brought him to a full stop, just when he expected to find himself within spring of the foe. A random pistol-shot had already aroused the Royalists. A volley scattered Grey's cavalry; and the battle simplified itself into two rows of foot-soldiers shooting at each other in the dark, across a broad trench of black water. The flight of the horse infected the drivers of the ammunitioncarts, who made off with the powder and ball. Monmouth thought he had better go too; and so he left the gallant "Mendip miners" to reap all the glory of this fight, by expending their last charge, and then falling to the number of a thousand, where they had fought so well. Sedgemoor was the last pitched battle fought on English soil. The capture of Monmouth, who was hiding in a shepherd's dress among pease and corn, and his execution on Tower Hill, followed in a few days (July 15).

Then began the " Bloody Assize." Colonel Kirke and his "lambs" a band of brutal soldiers trained at Tangier--performed a fitting prelude at Taunton by hanging the rebels in droves on the pole of the White Hart Inn, and then by quartering the bodies. Chief-Justice Jeffreys began his part of the work in September by arraigning Lady Alice Lisle at Win

chester. Two rebels had obtained shelter in her house; and for this she perished on the scaffold. Jeffreys wanted to burn her; but the prayers of friends obtained for her the slender boon of being allowed to leave life in a less painful manner. It is needless to follow the sickening details. Three hundred and twenty were hanged; almost three times as many were transported; while Jeffreys and his hangers-on grew rich on the spoils of the wretched victims. For these achievements James made him Lord High Chancellor of England.

The policy James meant to adopt became clearly manifest during the first year of his reign. He decidedly objected to two great statutes of the realm-the Habeas Corpus Act and the Test Act. The former he felt to be the grand barrier to despotism, and toward despotism the whole current of his nature ran the latter was a weapon forged by those who hated the creed he loved and meant to enforce. These, then, he determined to destroy; and, the better to uphold the kind of rule he meant to adopt, he resolved to establish a great standing army. In the newly levied regiments, commissions had already been given to Roman Catholic officers--a distinct violation of the Test Act. Alarm seized the nation. Lord President Halifax spoke out his mind at the council-board, and was in consequence dismissed from office. Opposition began to leaven the subservient Commons, and to spread too among the Lords; twice the government was defeated; and at last Black Rod came down to announce that the king wanted his refractory legislators at the bar, from which they went home under sentence of prorogation (Nov. 20, 1685).

The foreign policy of James resolved itself into a very simple form. There were two men to whom he truckled for his own purposes, irrespective altogether of the honour or the good of Great Britain: they were Louis the Fourteenth of France, whose paid agent he was, and the Pope of Rome, to whom he looked with superstitious devotion.

The men who at this time had most influence over James were, besides Father Petre and the Earl of Tyrconnel, already mentioned, the Earl of Sunderland, who wormed himself into the vacant chair of Halifax, and Lord Castlemaine, who had been tried for his complicity in the Meal-tub Plot.

Through all the year 1686 the plottings of the Jesuit clique struck root and put forth branches. Deeper and deeper grew the Romanist colouring of the court. Refusing to call the

Parliament together, James proceeded to set in action 1686 two great levers of tyranny, which he maintained to be essential appendages of his royal sceptre. These were the dispensing power, by which he placed Roman Catholics in office in defiance of the law, and the ecclesiastical supremacy, which embodied its meaning in a new High Commission Court, consisting of six men, presided over by Lord Chancellor Jeffreys. The nation knew well what these things portended, and riots in various places showed how the wind of popular feeling was beginning to blow.

The Romanism of James showed itself more clearly in the dismissal of Rochester and Clarendon, the brothers of his dead wife, than in any other way. Lawrence Hyde had climbed to the earldom of Rochester, and the eminent position of Lord High Treasurer, by watching his chances and by using his undoubted talents. His elder brother Henry, who wore the coronet of the great historian, was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland at this eventful time. Rochester would not abandon his Protestantism, and was therefore dismissed. Clarendon fell in his brother's ruin, and was succeeded by Tyrconnel in the lordlieutenancy. On the 7th of January 1687 the Treasury was put into commission. Some sudden conversions took place about this time-two noted men of letters, Wycherley and Dryden among them, declaring their adhesion to the Roman Catholic faith.

By a cunning move, intended to unite the Roman Catholics

April 4,

He

and the Puritans in a league against the Church of England, the king prepared and issued his First Declaration of Indulgence. By his own sole authority he swept 1687 away all the penal laws and tests which years had heaped heavily upon every class and creed of Dissenters. forbade any religious meeting to be disturbed, and ordained that no religious test should debar any man from civil or from military service. This decided relief and seeming boon brought out the true colours of the Puritans, severing that great and powerful body in two unequal parts. The famous Quaker, William Penn, whose father, Admiral Penn, had fought under James against the Dutch, and who had always enjoyed a ready access to the royal closet, headed the minority in lauding the Indulgence; but the great Puritan chiefs-Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan-looked suspiciously on the thing, and would not permit themselves to be lured into promoting a split in the camp of Protestantism.

July 3.

At Windsor, on July 3, James publicly received the Count of Adda, who, as nuncio of Pope Innocent, had been for some time living in London and visiting at court in a private capacity. The Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Lumley, and other officers of state at once resigned. The king then openly committed the administration of the government to Sunderland (now a Catholic) and Father Petre. As Parliament had been dissolved about the same time, their power was absolute.

The two great universities were assailed by James through the medium of his High Commission Court. In February 1687, a royal letter was presented to the senate at Cambridge, requiring them to confer the degree of Master on Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk. They sent a message to Francis that they would gladly do so, if he took the necessary oath; but this he would not do. The vice-chancellor-John Peachell-and eight members of the senate appeared on summons at Westminster