[187] It appears to me that no impartial person, who reads Macaulay’s defence of his own charges against Penn, in the last edition of the History of England, can fail to see how unsatisfactory are the arguments which he employs. The subject has been discussed afresh in the Spring number of the Quarterly Review for 1868.
[188] When the sister of these youths presented a petition on their behalf, while waiting in the ante-chamber for admission to the Royal presence, Lord Churchill, standing near the chimney-piece, said, “Madam, I dare not flatter you with any such hopes, for that marble is as capable of feeling compassion as the King’s heart.”—Kiffin’s Life, quoted in Wilson.
[189] Wilson’s Dissenting Churches, i. 403–31.
[190] Clarendon’s Correspondence, ii. 506.
[191] Autobiography of Sir John Bramston.—Camden Society, p. 280.
[192] Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, and A Full and True Relation of the Entry, reprinted in Somers’ Tracts, 2nd Edition.
[193] State Trials, iv. 250.
[194] State Trials, 258, et seq. “Dr. Fairfax is a very modest, quiet-tempered man, of very few words, loves to be concerned in no public business, and offered great violence to his own temper, to appear now; but he has other apprehensions of the danger the Church and State are in, than formerly he had, and so is far more tender to the Dissenters for these last ten or twelve years than he was before.”—Entring Book, June 11. Morice MSS.
[195] Vol. iv. 265, et seq.
[196] State Papers, Dom. James II. 1867, Sept. 9.