Lectures on Modern historyActon, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History
Lectures on Modern history
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History, Modern
When Lewis revoked the Edict of Toleration the pope did not conceal
his displeasure. He was compelled at last to allow Te Deums and
illuminations; but he made no secret of his disbelief in the armed
apostolate of missionaries in jackboots. He was bitterly opposed to
the Gallican system, out of which the persecution proceeded. James II
was odious to him for many reasons. First as a promoter of French
tendencies, both in politics and in religion. For James, like Lewis,
was a Gallican in Church questions. When an Englishman defended
ultramontane propositions in a disputation at Louvain, he expressed
his indignation that such an attack should have been permitted in his
presence on the plenary authority of kings. He offended the pope by
sending as his ambassador Lord Castlemaine, who was ridiculous not
only as the Duchess of Cleveland's husband, but as the author of a
book in which he pleaded for toleration on the ground that Catholics
should be as well treated in England as Protestants in France. With
great reluctance the pope consented that his agent, D'Adda, should be
appointed a nuncio; but when James made the Jesuit Petre a privy
councillor, giving him his own apartment at Whitehall, and represented
that he would be fitter for such a position if he was made a bishop or
a cardinal, Innocent refused.
Petre laid the blame on the nuncio, and the Jesuits asked that he
should be sent out of the country. He would be forced, said the king,
to do without the Court of Rome. D'Adda gave the same advice as the
Prince of Orange, that the Penal Laws should not be executed, but the
Test Acts retained; and he was one of those who, when the crisis came,
maintained that there was nothing to fear from William. After
Innocent's death in 1689 there was a change, but Rome declared in
favour of taking the oath to William III. Perth wrote from Rome in
1695: "The Prince of Orange has more friends here than either in
England or Holland, and the king is universally hated. It's scandalous
to hear what is said every day, publicly, when they make comparisons
betwixt an heretical, unnatural, usurping tyrant and His Majesty."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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