The real enemy, he said, of the British Roman Catholics was that shortsighted and headstrong monarch who, when he might easily have obtained for them a legal toleration, had trampled on law, liberty, property, in order to raise them to an odious and precarious ascendency.

If the misgovernment of James were suffered to continue, it must produce, at no remote time, a popular outbreak, which might be followed by a barbarous persecution of the Papists.

The Prince declared that to avert the horrors of such a persecution was one of his chief objects.

If he succeeded in his design, he would use the power which he must then possess, as head of the Protestant interest, to protect the members of the Church of Rome.

Perhaps the passions excited by the tyranny of James might make it impossible to efface the penal laws from the statute book but those laws should be mitigated by a lenient administration.