"The best Your Majesty can do," said Sunderland, "is to gain the Dissenters, call a packed parliament of them and the Catholics in the autumn, pass the repeal of the Test Act, treat French interference firmly, strengthen the army, and bring the Irish to overawe London. There will be no murmurs against your authority this time a year hence."
James gave my lord a pleased glance.
"Your views suit with mine," he replied. "I'll officer the army with Catholics—and look to those two judges who favoured these bishops. We will remove them from the bench."
He was still alternating between ill-humour at the open display of feeling on the occasion of the public cross he had received in the matter of the bishops and the satisfaction my lord's wholly congenial counsel gave his obstinate self-confidence. A certain faith in himself and in the office he held, a still greater trust in the religion to which he was so blindly devoted, a tyrannical belief in firm measures and in the innate loyalty of church and people made this son of Charles I, sitting in the very palace from which his father had stepped on to the scaffold at the command of a plain gentleman from Hampshire, revolve schemes for the subjugation of England more daring than Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stewart had ventured on yet; he desired openly and violently to put England into the somewhat reluctant hands of the Pope, and beside this desire every other consideration was as nothing to His Majesty.
"Let 'em shout," he said. "I can afford it." And he thought of his young heir, whose birth secured the Romish succession in England; an event that took the sting even from the acquittal of the stubborn bishops.
"Your Majesty is indeed a great and happy Prince," remarked my lord, with that softness that gave his compliments the value of sincere meaning.
The King went up to him, smiled at him in his heavy way, and touched him affectionately on the shoulder.
"Well, well," he answered, "you give good advice, and I thank you, my lord."
He fell into silence again, and the Earl took graceful leave, left the cabinet gently, and gently closed the door.
When outside in the corridor he paused like one considering, then went lightly down the wide stairs.