The Judges, in the case of Sir Edward Hales, having decided in favour of the King’s dispensing power; and having also given it as their opinion, that the laws of England were the King’s laws, that it was an inseparable branch of his prerogative to dispense with penal statutes, and that of the reasons for doing so in particular cases he was sole Judge;--James immediately proceeded by Letters Patent, dated May the 3rd, 1686, to authorize Edward Sclater to retain his benefice, after he had, on the previous Palm Sunday, confessed his conversion to Romanism by attending Mass. He also allowed Obadiah Walker, a clergyman who had long secretly leaned to Popery, and now openly avowed his conversion, to retain his position and emoluments as Master of University College, Cambridge. By a still bolder stroke, the King dashed down the barriers which guarded admission to the Establishment, and conferred the Deanery of Christ Church upon John Massey,--a Roman Catholic priest, possessing neither learning nor ability,--who instantly decked an altar in the usual way for the celebration of Mass. The two sees of Chester and Oxford fell vacant in 1686. James appointed to the one Thomas Cartwright, Dean of Ripon, a worthless sycophant, who might be expected to do anything to please his master; and to the other, Samuel Parker, already well known to the reader for his violent Tory and High Church publications.[159] “I wished,” says the King to the Papal Nuncio, Adda, “to appoint an avowed Catholic, but the time is not come. Parker is well inclined to us, he is one of us in feeling, and, by degrees, he will bring round his clergy.”[160] [Sidenote: 1686.]