General Harrison and nine other members of the court, Colonels Axtell and Hacker, who had superintended the execution, and Sir Henry Vane, though he was not an actual regicide.
Only notable in British history because she brought the isle of Bombay as her dowry.
CHAPTER XXX.
JAMES II.
1685-1688.
No greater testimony to the caution and cleverness of Charles II. can be given than the fact that, after a reign of twenty-five stormy years, he died in possession of a very considerable measure of absolute power, having lived down his troubles, secured the devotion of the larger half of the nation, strengthened himself with a standing army, and dispensed for three years with any summons of Parliament.
His successor was to prove that a man without tact and pliability, pursuing the same schemes for the restoration of arbitrary government and Romanism, might wreck himself in three years and die an exile.
Character of James.
Yet James of York was in many ways a stronger and a better man than Charles II. He possessed conscience and courage in a far greater measure than his brother. His life was not an open scandal; his word could be relied upon; his attachment to his faith was devoted and sincere. But he had three ruinous faults: he was obstinate to blindness; long after a fact had become patent to all men, he would refuse to recognize its existence. He was full of a bigoted self-sufficiency that arose from an overweening belief in his own good intentions and wisdom. Lastly, he was a man unable to forgive or forget; there was no drop of mercy in his composition; he could understand nothing but the letter of the law. Blind, conceited, pitiless, he was bound to win the hatred of all who differed from him, and it was soon to be discovered that nine-tenths of the English nation were numbered in that class.