How little however he might approve of James's administration, he always kept a total silence on the subject, and gave no countenance to those discontents which were propagated with such industry throughout the nation.
It was from the application of James himself that the prince first openly took any part in English affairs.

Notwithstanding the lofty ideas which the king had entertained of his prerogative, he found that the edicts emitted from it still wanted much of the authority of laws, and that the continuance of them might in the issue become dangerous both to himself and to the Catholics, whom he desired to favor.

An act of parliament alone could insure the indulgence or toleration which he had labored to establish; and he hoped that, if the prince would declare in favor of that scheme, the members who had hitherto resisted all his own applications, would at last be prevailed with to adopt it.

The consent, therefore, of the prince to the repeal of the penal statutes and of the test was strongly solicited by the king; and in order to engage him to agree to that measure, hopes were given,[*] that England would second him in all those enterprises which his active and extensive genius had with such success planned on the continent.

He was at this time the centre of all the negotiations of Christendom.
* Bennet vol.i.p.