But, whatever pretext the custom of centuries or the authority of compliant lawyers might afford for these dispensations from the test, no legal defence could be made for the ecclesiastical commission of 1686. The high commission court of Elizabeth had been altogether taken away by an act of the long parliament, which went on to provide that no new court should be erected with the like power, jurisdiction, and authority. Yet the commission issued by James II. followed very nearly the words of that which had created the original court under Elizabeth, omitting a few particulars of little moment.[99] It is not known, I believe, at whose suggestion the king adopted this measure. The pre-eminence reserved by the commission to Jefferies, whose presence was made necessary to all their meetings, and the violence with which he acted in all their transactions on record, seems to point him out as its great promoter; though it is true that, at a later period, Jefferies seems to have perceived the destructive indiscretion of the popish counsellors. It displayed the king's change of policy and entire separation from that high-church party, to whom he was indebted for the throne; since the manifest design of the ecclesiastical commission was to bridle the clergy, and silence the voice of protestant zeal. The proceedings against the Bishop of London, and other instances of hostility to the established religion, are well known. Elated by success and general submission, exasperated by the reluctance and dissatisfaction of those on whom he had relied for an active concurrence with his desires, the king seems at least by this time to have formed the scheme of subverting, or impairing as far as possible, the religious establishment. He told Barillon, alluding to the ecclesiastical commission, that God had permitted all the statutes which had been enacted against the catholic religion to become the means of its re-establishment.[100] But the most remarkable evidence of this design was the collation of Massey, a recent convert, to the deanery of Christ Church, with a dispensation from all the statutes of uniformity and other ecclesiastical laws, so ample that it made a precedent, and such it was doubtless intended to be, for bestowing any benefices upon members of the church of Rome. This dispensation seems to have been not generally known at the time. Burnet has stated the circumstances of Massey's promotion inaccurately; and no historian, I believe, till the publication of the instrument after the middle of the last century, was fully aware of the degree in which the king had trampled upon the securities of the established church in this transaction.[101]