It was the fashion to hold Cabinet meetings on Sunday nights. One Sunday morning, the Duke of York asked Guilford to assist him in a business which would that evening be brought before His Majesty. Guilford thought that certain Courtiers just then looked at him with remarkable gravity, as if something important was about to come on the carpet; but he did not discover its nature until after the meeting had commenced. Jeffreys had returned fresh from a Northern tour, and had brought with him reports of large numbers of Papists convicted of being recusants, and, after placing on the table rolls containing their names, he rose from his chair, and proceeded to say:-- [Sidenote: CABINET MEETING.] “I have a business to lay before your Majesty, which I took notice of in the North, and which will deserve your Majesty’s royal commiseration. It is the case of numberless numbers of your good subjects, that are imprisoned for recusancy. I have the list of them here, to justify what I say. They are so many that the great gaols cannot hold them without their lying one upon another.” Then, to use the language of Roger North, “he let fly his tropes and figures about rotting and stinking in prisons;” and concluded his speech with a motion that His Majesty be requested to discharge “these poor men,” and restore them to “liberty and air.”[129] Such a motion from such a man will be at once understood. It could have been made only to please his Royal master, and that master’s brother. If selfishness influenced Jeffreys in making the proposal, selfishness influenced Guilford in opposing it; for, on the one hand, any such pardon as that now proposed, must pass the Great Seal of which he was keeper; and by affixing this to such an unpopular instrument, he might bring himself into trouble with his friends. On the other hand, by refusal he might incur a forfeiture of office, and have to give place to his most odious enemy. After the Lord Keeper had sat silent awhile, expecting some of the Lords in the Protestant interest, as Halifax and Rochester, to speak,--he rose and addressed the King, entreating that the Chief Justice might declare, whether all the persons named in these rolls were actually in prison or not. His Lordship replied that he did not imagine any one could suspect that to be his meaning, but that they were under sentence of commitment, and were liable to be taken up by any peevish Sheriff or Magistrate. North then proceeded to attack all Sectaries. They were a turbulent people, he said, and always stirring up sedition; and, if they did so when they were obnoxious to the laws, what would they not do, if His Majesty gave them a discharge at once? Was it not better that his enemies should live under some disadvantages, and be obnoxious to His Majesty’s pleasure, who might, if they were turbulent and troublesome, inflict the penalties of the law upon them? As to the Roman Catholics, if there were any persons to