But as his actions in other matters bettered his professions, so I presently found that in this too he belied himself; which was made clear when he came to the test. For the death of King Charles the Second occurring soon after I came to serve him--so soon that I still winced when my former life was probed, and hated a woman and trembled at sight of a constable, and wondered if this were really _I_, who went to and fro daily from my garret in Bride Lane to St. Dunstan's--the death, I say, of the King occurring just at that time, we were speedily overwhelmed by a rush of events so momentous and following so quickly one on another that they threw the old see-saw of Court and Country off its balance; and upset with it the minds of many who had hitherto clung firmly to a party. For the King had been scarcely laid very quietly--some thought, meanly--in his grave and the Duke of York been proclaimed by the title of James the Second, when those who had fled the country in the last reign, either after the Rye House Plot, or later with Monmouth, returned and kindled two great insurrections, that of the Marquess of Argyle in the north, and that of the Duke of Monmouth in the west. Occurring almost simultaneously, it was wonderful to see how, in spite of the cry of a Popish King, and the Protestant religion in danger, which the rebels everywhere raised, these outbreaks rallied all prudent folk to the King; whose popularity never, before or afterwards, stood so high as on the day of the battle of Sedgmoor. And doubtless he might have retained the confidence and affection of his people, and by these means attained to the utmost of his legitimate wishes--I mean the relief of the papists from penal clauses if not from civil disabilities--had he gone about it discreetly, and with the moderation which so delicate a matter required. But in the outset the severity with which the western rebels were punished, both by the military after the rout and by the Lord Chief Justice at the Assizes which followed, gave check to his popularity; and thenceforth for three years all went one way. The Test Acts, abrogated at the first in a case here and there (yet ominously in such, in particular, as favoured the admission of papists to the army), were presently nullified, with other acts of a like character, by a general declaration of indulgence; and that, to the disgust of the clergy, to be read in the churches. To this main assault on the passive obedience which the Church had so often preached, and to which it still fondly clung, were added innumerable meaner attacks perhaps more humiliating; as the expulsion of the Protestant Fellows from Magdalene College, the conversion of University College into a Romish Seminary, and the dismissal of my Lords Rochester and Clarendon, the King's brothers-in-law, from all their places because--as was everywhere rumoured--they would not resign the creed in which they had been born.