When the crown was set on his head it slipped, and nigh fell on the floor; and this little incident was whispered, then bruited, through England, and was regarded as a token from heaven that he was not the rightful Sovereign, but an usurper.
Then came the punishment of that scoundrel, Titus Oates, richly deserved; but Oates was a popular favourite, and his chastisement raised him to the pedestal of a Protestant martyr.
It was well known that James aimed at the repeal of the Habeas Corpus Act, and at the toleration—even promotion—of Popery, and the country was in fevered agitation and brooding anger at what was menaced.
Such was the condition of affairs in the spring of 1685.
There had been catching weather, a few days of bright sunshine, and then thunder-showers. Then the sky had cleared, the wind was well up to the north, and, though the sun was hot, the air was fresh. It was scented, everywhere except on the moor, with the fragrance of hay.
Julian Crymes was out of doors enjoying the balmy air and the sloping, golden rays of the evening sun. She had some embroidery in her hands; but she worked little at it. Her eyes looked away dreamily at the distant moor, and specially at a little grey patch of sycamores, that seemed—so remote were they—against the silvery moor, to be a cloud-shadow. Behind that grey tuft rose Ger Tor, strewn with granite boulders; and on one side opened the blue cleft of the Tavy, where it had sawn for itself a way from the moor-land into the low country. The dark eyes of the girl were full to spilling—so full that, had she tried to continue her needlework, she would have been unable to see how to make her stitches.
Her breath came short and quick, for she was suffering real pain—that gnawing ache which in its initiation is mental, but which becomes sensibly physical.
Julian had loved Anthony. She loved him still. When he had come that evening of the fair to Kilworthy, her heart had bounded: her head had been giddy with pleasure at seeing him again—above all, at seeing him without his wife. Towards Urith she felt implacable, corroding hatred. That girl—with no merit that she could see, only a gloomy beauty—a beauty as savage as the moors on the brink of which she lived, and on which Anthony had found her—that girl had shaken to pieces at a touch her cloud-castle of happiness, and dissolved it into a rain of salt disappointment.
Anthony was taken from her, taken from her for ever, and her own hopes laid in the dust. Julian had battled with her turbulent heart; her conscience had warned her to forget Anthony, and at times she really felt as if she had conquered her passion. No sooner, however, did she see Anthony again, than it woke up in full strength; and whenever she saw Urith, her jealous rage shook itself and sharpened its claws.
Her father was away in London, and on the seat beside her lay a letter she had that day received from him. He had written full of uneasiness at the political and religious situation. Recently the Earl of Bath had been down in the West of England with new charters to towns in Devon and Cornwall, constituting new electoral bodies, or altering the former bodies, and a hurried election had ensued, in which great pressure had been used to obtain the return of the Court party, of Catholics and Tories, by intimidation on the one side and by bribery on the other. Mr. Crymes, however, supported by the authority of the Earl of Bedford, had been returned for Tavistock in the Protestant interest, and he was now in London, sitting in the first Parliament summoned by James II.