Many lords and gentlemen, who had, in December, taken arms for the Prince of Orange and a Free Parliament, muttered, two months later, that they had been drawn in; that they had trusted too much to His Highness's Declaration; that they had given him credit for a disinterestedness which, it now appeared, was not in his nature.

They had meant to put on King James, for his own good, some gentle force, to punish the Jesuits and renegades who had misled him, to obtain from him some guarantee for the safety of the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of the realm, but not to uncrown and banish him.

For his maladministration, gross as it had been, excuses were found.

Was it strange that, driven from his native land, while still a boy, by rebels who were a disgrace to the Protestant name, and forced to pass his youth in countries where the Roman Catholic religion was established, he should have been captivated by that most attractive of all superstitions?
Was it strange that, persecuted and calumniated as he had been by an implacable faction, his disposition should have become sterner and more severe than it had once been thought, and that, when those who had tried to blast his honour and to rob him of his birthright were at length in his power, he should not have sufficiently tempered justice with mercy?
As to the worst charge which had been brought against him, the charge of trying to cheat his daughters out of their inheritance by fathering a supposititious child, on what grounds did it rest?
Merely on slight circumstances, such as might well be imputed to accident, or to that imprudence which was but too much in harmony with his character.

Did ever the most stupid country justice put a boy in the stocks without requiring stronger evidence than that on which the English people had pronounced their King guilty of the basest and most odious of all frauds?
Some great faults he had doubtless committed, nothing could be more just or constitutional than that for those faults his advisers and tools should be called to a severe reckoning; nor did any of those advisers and tools more richly deserve punishment than the Roundhead sectaries whose adulation had encouraged him to persist in the fatal exercise of the dispensing power.