James publicly attended the rites of his church; he surrounded himself by Catholic priests, a leading Jesuit, Father Petre, being his political confidant; he entertained at his court—for the first time in England since the days of Queen Mary—a papal nuncio. He placed the Church under the control of a High Commission of seven members, Jeffreys, now Lord Chancellor, at the head. In chartered towns, Catholics were to be eligible to serve as mayors and aldermen. He began the formation of a large standing army, and, in defiance of the Test Act, and in assertion of his dispensing power, he largely officered this army by Catholics. The university of Oxford had, in the previous reign, declared that in no case was resistance to the royal authority justifiable, and it had now to reap the bitter fruits of its servile declaration. The King appointed a Roman Catholic to the deanery of Christ Church; another to the presidency of Magdalen College, and twelve Catholic fellows were appointed in one day. Oxford now began to see that passive obedience might well stop short of a surrender of religious principles; it resisted the royal mandates; and it would not submit, although twenty- five of its fellows were expelled. And a contagion of conversion broke out in the higher social ranks. Noble lords and ladies of fashion went to mass and confession; processions of Catholic priests were daily met in the streets of London; Catholic chapels and monasteries were becoming numerous, their service bells ringing perpetually. In Scotland, the Chancellorship was bestowed on one of the King’s time- serving converts, Drummond, Earl of Perth. He co-operated with the Earl of Sunderland in England, in driving on James to the most extravagant reactionary measures. By a new court order all persons holding civil offices in Scotland were ordered to resign, and to resume their offices without taking the test oath, ordered in 1681, they taking, for thus breaking the law, a remission of penalties from the Crown; all not obtaining such remission to be subjected to the said penalties. That is,—all officials were ordered to break the law, and were to be subject to penalties for such infringement,—unless by getting the King’s pardon they acknowledged his power to abrogate the law! And this test oath had been the contrivance of James himself when in Scotland,—forced upon Presbyterians at the sword’s point, and held so sacred that Argyle had been condemned to death for taking it with a slight qualification.