His fate provoked little sympathy, for he had clearly brought his trouble on his own head. But the cruel punishment that was dealt out to the poor ignorant peasants who had followed him shocked the whole nation. Hundreds of rebels taken in arms were hung, or shot after a summary court-martial by the brutal Colonel Kirke, a veteran who had learnt ferocity by serving against the Moors in Africa. After the summary executions were over, Judge Jeffreys, a clever but worthless lawyer, whom the king made the chief instrument of his cruelties, descended on the south-western counties. In the "Bloody Assize," as his circuit was called, he put to death more than 300 persons, after the barest mockery of a trial, and sent 1000 more to work as slaves on the plantations of Jamaica and Barbados. Of all Jeffreys' judicial murders, the worst was that of the aged Lady Lisle. For having sheltered a fugitive from Sedgemoor, she was sentenced by this barbarian to be burnt, and he thought it an act of clemency when he commuted the penalty to beheading (September, 1685).
The king's Romanist schemes.
The ease with which he had crushed the rising of Monmouth and Argyle emboldened James to take seriously in hand the great project of his life, the restoration of Romanism. His plan was to fill all offices in Church and State with open or secret Papists, and to overawe discontent by the muskets of a large standing army. That such a plan was dangerous, and even impossible, when nine-tenths of the nation was devotedly attached to Protestantism, he does not seem to have realized. He relied on his observations of the men about his own person, for many of the demoralized courtiers of Charles II. were quite ready to become Romanists if only it brought them preferment. They would probably have become Jews or Moslems if it had been made worth their while. The basest of these degraded opportunists was James's chief minister, Lord Sunderland, the tool of all his worst acts of tyranny and folly. With such a man as his chief adviser, and the infamous Jeffreys—now made Lord Chancellor—as his chief executioner, the king was likely to go to any lengths. Of his other councillors the chief were Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a bigoted Irish Romanist of very depraved manners, and Father Petre, a Jesuit priest.
The Test Act and the dispensing power.
James commenced his campaign against Protestantism in 1686. The chief bar to the admission of Papists to office in the public service and the army was the Test Act of 1673, which excluded all save English Churchmen from any post in the state. Knowing that no Parliament would repeal this act, James resolved to annul it on his own authority. One of the oldest weapons of the Stuarts was the claim to a "dispensing power," a right of the king to grant immunity on his own authority for offences against the law of the land. This was the tool which he had now resolved to employ against the Test Act. He appointed a Romanist named Sir Edward Hales colonel of one of the new regiments which he was busily employed in raising. Hales was prosecuted for illegally accepting the commission, and pleaded in defence that the king had dispensed him from taking the test. The case was brought before a bench of judges carefully packed by the orders of James, and they gave the wholly unconstitutional decision that the king's dispensation covered Hales from all penalties. Armed with this opinion of the judges, James began to give place and office to Romanists right and left; they were made judges, officers, sheriffs, lord-lieutenants, mayors, all by virtue of the king's dispensing power. None but Catholics could for the future hope for any preferment.
Attack on the Church and Oxford University.
The king next proceeded to attack the Church of England; once more pleading his dispensing power, he began to give Papists office in the Church. Not only did he make over crown livings to them, but he filled two vacant headships of Oxford colleges with notorious Romanists, showing thereby his intention to put the control of education into the hands of his own co-religionists. Somewhat later, he expelled the whole body of Fellows and Scholars of Magdalen College, for refusing to receive the President whom he had chosen for them [1687], herein following the example of Charles, who had deprived the philosopher John Locke of his studentship at Christ Church, for holding Whig opinions. To deal with things religious, James revived the Court of High Commission, one of the old despotic courts which the Long Parliament had abolished forty years before; he placed Jeffreys at its head, and used it for the oppression of all clergy who showed signs of opposing him. Meanwhile a large army, including several Irish regiments, was concentrated at Hounslow to overawe London.
The nation, though sorely tried by these exhibitions of James's high-handed bigotry, required still further provocation before it rose against him. The Tory party were so deeply committed to the doctrine of divine right and passive obedience, that it required an even more desperate attack on the Church of England to set them in arms against the king. The Whigs were so crushed and depressed, that they had not the heart to rebel. It may be added that the fact that the king was an elderly man, while his heiress Mary, Princess of Orange, was a firm Protestant, kept many men quiet. They held that the king must die ere long, and that his wild schemes would die with him.
The Declaration of Indulgence.