National patience was exhausted. These indulgences were right enough in principle; but there were two great objections to their being published. First, it was a most unconstitutional and outrageous stretch of royal authority to pretend, “by virtue of our _sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power_,” to “_suspend, stop_, and _disable_ laws and Acts of Parliament,” without parliamentary consent. And, secondly, it was well known that, in publishing these unconstitutional declarations, James was not actuated with the least wish to do justice to Protestant Nonconformists; but chiefly, if not exclusively, desired the toleration of his own sect, the Papists; and hoped that this might be a preparatory step to the triumphant establishment of the Popish Church. James’s conduct in Scotland, where he had hacked to pieces so many Protestants, could not be forgotten, but spoke far more loudly than the hollow-hearted language of his indulgent declarations; besides, the loud denunciations of James’s Lord Chancellor, the bloodthirsty Jeffreys, against all Protestant Dissenters as king-haters, rebels, and republicans, were still ringing in the nation’s ears. The people remembered that, within the last three years, the great and good Richard Baxter, had been committed to the King’s Bench Prison on the charge of printing his paraphrase of the New Testament; and had been brought to trial, before Jeffreys, at Westminster, at the very time that Titus Oates was standing in the pillory in the New Palace Yard; Jeffreys gleefully exclaiming at the moment, “If Baxter stood on the other side of Oates’s pillory, I would say two of the greatest rogues and rascals in the kingdom stood there.” The people remembered that the insulted Baxter, for his alleged offence, had been fined five hundred marks, and had been ordered to lie in prison until the fine was paid; besides being bound to good behaviour for seven years. They were not able to forget, that, in the very year before the first declaration was issued, the Protestant Dissenters had again and again had their private religious meetings, which they had dared to hold, disturbed and broken up, both in town and country, by the myrmidons of King James’s government; and that Sir John Hartop, and some others, at Stoke Newington, had had distresses levied for the payment of a fine of about £700.[32] For James to pretend friendship to Protestant Dissenters, in the face of such facts, was a piece of hypocrisy, which none but a royal simpleton, afflicted with a little mind, and blinded by prejudice, would have attempted to impose upon the credulity of intelligent and religious men. ----- Footnote 32: Baxter’s _Life and Times_. -----