“_K._--‘The consummation of a former election! It was downright disobedience, and is a fresh aggravation. Get you gone home, and immediately repair to your Chapel, and elect the Bishop of Oxon, or else you must expect to feel the heavy hand of an angry King.’ “The Fellows offered their petition again, on their knees. “_K._--‘Get ye gone, I will receive nothing from you till you have obeyed me, and elected the Bishop of Oxford.’ “Upon which they went directly to their Chapel, and Dr. Pudsey proposing whether they would obey the King and elect the Bishop, they answered every one in his order; they were always willing to obey His Majesty in all things that lay in their power, as any of the rest of His Majesty’s subjects, but the electing of the Bishop of Oxford being directly contrary to their Statutes, and to the positive oath they had taken, they could not apprehend it in their power to obey him in this matter. Only Mr. Dobson, who had publicly prayed for Dr. Hough, the undoubted President, answered doubtingly, he was ready to obey in every thing he could. And Mr. Charrochi, a Papist, that he was for obeying in that.”[196] [Sidenote: PROMOTION OF ROMANISTS.] [Sidenote: 1687.] James found this a much more troublesome business than he had expected; and in October he thought it necessary to send to Oxford a Special Commission to endeavour to reduce Magdalen College to obedience. Forty years before this, when the Parliamentary army had taken possession of the University, Puritan Commissioners had visited the City to eject from office the loyal Episcopalians; and now, Commissioners of a far different character, and escorted by troops of cavalry, appeared in the same place, to eject men of the same stamp as had been ejected in 1647. Traditions of the past must have risen before Hough and his companions; and as they compared their own treatment by the King, with the treatment of Dr. Oliver by the Parliament, they must have felt the aggravated cruelty and injustice which they had to endure in the present instance; for, before it was a warfare of one Church against another Church--now opposition came not only from a Monarch sworn by law to support the Establishment, but from a prelate who was bound by his most religious vows to do the same; Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, being one of the Commissioners on the occasion. Conscientious Churchmen suffered persecution from the powers they had long honoured even to excess: they could, in this instance, as in so many others at the same period, complain both of treachery and ingratitude, if there be any obligations arising from oaths on the one side, or any obligations arising from loyalty on the other. What the King’s Commissioners did, and how the President and Fellows of Magdalen behaved, are well represented by the chisel of Roubiliac upon the famous sarcophagus to the memory of Hough, in Worcester Cathedral, and are succinctly described in the well-known words which form the inscription upon that