St. James’s Park opposite is screened off and separated now by the Horse Guards and other public buildings, a long and heavy line which forms one side of the way. But in those days there were neither public buildings nor busy street. The palace, straggling and irregular, with walls and roofs on many different levels, stood like a sort of royal village between the river and the park, with the turrets of St. James twinkling in the distance, in the sunshine, over the trees of the Mall, where King Charles with all his dogs and gentlemen would stream forth daily for his saunter or his game. The Cockpit was one of the outlying portions of Whitehall upon the edge of the park. Anne had been but two years married when King Charles died. And then the aspect of affairs changed. The mass in the private chapel, and the presence here and there of somebody who looked like a priest, at once started into prominence and began to alarm the gazers more than the dissolute amusements of the court had ever done. James was not virtuous any more than his brother. One of the first acts which the excellent Evelyn, one of the best of men, had to do as commissioner of the privy seal, was to affix that imperial stamp to a patent by which one of the new king’s favorites was made Countess of Dorchester; but James’s immoralities were not his chief characteristics. He was a more dangerous king than Charles, who was merely selfish, dissolute, and pleasure-loving. James was more; he was a bigoted Roman Catholic, eager to raise his faith to its old supremacy, and the mere thought that the door which had been so bolted and barred against popery was now set open filled all England with the wildest panic. The nation felt itself caught by the torrent which must carry it to destruction. Men saw the dungeons of the Inquisition, the fires of Smithfield, before them as soon as the proscribed priest was readmitted and mass once more openly said at an unconcealed altar. Never was there a more universal or all-influential sentiment. The terror, the unanimity, are things to wonder at. Sancroft and his bishops were not constitutionalists. The personal rule of the king had nothing in it that alarmed them; but the idea of the reintroduction of popery awoke such a panic in their bosoms as drove them, in spite of their own tenets, into resistance; and, for the first time absolutely unanimous, England was at their back. When we take history piecemeal, and read it through the individual lives of the chief actors, we perceive with the strangest sensations of surprise that at these great crises not one of the leaders of the nation was sure what he wanted or what he feared, or was even entirely sincere in his adherence to one party against another. They were the courtiers of James, and invited William; they were William’s ministers, and kept up a correspondence with James. The best of them was not without a treacherous side. They were never certain which was safest, which would