The only matter in which the king’s views were in any degree thwarted was the reversal of Lord Stafford’s attainder, which, having passed the House of Lords, not without opposition, was lost in the House of Commons; a strong proof that the popish plot was still the subject upon which the opposers of the court had most credit with the public.  Mr. Hume, notwithstanding his just indignation at the condemnation of Stafford, and his general inclination to approve of royal politics, most unaccountably justifies the Commons in their rejection of this bill, upon the principle of its being impolitic at that time to grant so full a justification of the Catholics, and to throw so foul an imputation upon the Protestants.  Surely if there be one moral duty that is binding upon men in all times, places, and circumstances, and from which no supposed views of policy can excuse them, it is that of granting a full justification to the innocent; and such Mr. Hume considers the Catholics, and especially Lord Stafford, to have been.  The only rational way of accounting for this solitary instance of non-compliance on the part of the Commons is either to suppose that they still believed in the reality of the popish plot, and Stafford’s guilt, or that the Church party, which was uppermost, had such an antipathy to popery, as indeed to every sect whose tenets differed from theirs, that they deemed everything lawful against its professors.

On the 2nd of July parliament was adjourned for the purpose of enabling the principal gentlemen to be present in their respective counties at a time when their services and influence might be so necessary to government.  It is said that the House of Commons consisted of members so devoted to James, that he declared there were not forty in it whom he would not himself have named.  But although this may have been true, and though from the new modelling of the corporations, and the interference of the court in elections, this parliament, as far as regards the manner of its being chosen, was by no means a fair representative of the legal electors of England, yet there is reason to think that it afforded a tolerably correct sample of the disposition of the nation, and especially of the Church party, which was then uppermost.

The general character of the party at this time appears to have been a high notion of the king’s constitutional power, to which was superadded a kind of religious abhorrence of all resistance to the monarch, not only in cases where such resistance was directed against the lawful prerogative, but even in opposition to encroachments which the monarch might make beyond the extended limits which they assigned to his prerogative.  But these tenets, and still more the principle of conduct naturally resulting from them, were confined to the civil, as contra-distinguished from the ecclesiastical polity of the country.  In Church matters they neither acknowledged any very high authority in the crown, nor were they willing to submit to any royal