The infatuated monarch was irritated by that which he should have taken as a terrible warning, this resistance to his will from the university of Oxford. That sanctuary of pure unspotted loyalty, as some would say, that sink of all that was most abject in servility, as less courtly tongues might murmur, the university of Oxford, which had but four short years back, by a solemn decree in convocation, poured forth anathemas on all who had doubted the divine right of monarchy, or asserted the privileges of subjects against their sovereigns, which had boasted in its addresses of an obedience without any restrictions or limitations, which but recently had seen a known convert to popery, and a person disqualified in other ways, installed by the chapter without any remonstrance in the deanery of Christ Church, was now the scene of a firm though temperate opposition to the king's positive command, and soon after the willing instrument of his ruin. In vain the pamphleteers, on the side of the court, upbraided the clergy with their apostacy from the principles they had so much vaunted. The imputation it was hard to repel; but, if they could not retract their course without shame, they could not continue in it without destruction.[127] They were driven to extremity by the order of May 4, 1688, to read the declaration of indulgence in their churches.[128] This, as is well known, met with great resistance, and, by inducing the primate and six other bishops to present a petition to the king against it, brought on that famous persecution, which, more perhaps than all his former actions, cost him the allegiance of the Anglican church. The proceedings upon the trial of those prelates are so familiar as to require no particular notice.[129] What is most worthy of remark is, that the very party who had most extolled the royal prerogative, and often in such terms as if all limitations of it were only to subsist at pleasure, became now the instruments of bringing it down within the compass and control of the law. If the king had a right to suspend the execution of statutes by proclamation, the bishops' petition might not indeed be libellous, but their disobedience and that of the clergy could not be warranted; and the principal argument both of the bar and the bench rested on the great question of that prerogative.