full number, six hundred and thirty-five members, having site before. The management of these raw representatives was intrusted by James to two thorough government creatures—the lord Middleton, who had cut so dismal a figure in the Scottish prosecutions with Lauderdale, and Graham, lord Preston, who had long been the ambassador at Paris, and well drilled into the practice of corruption through the secret bribery of Louis. In the first business, the election of a speaker, the court appeared divided against itself. The lord chancellor Guildford recommended Sir Thomas Mears, a trimmer, like himself, but Jeffreys, who never omitted an opportunity of mortifying Guildford, proposed Sir John Trevor, a pettifogging tool of his own, and he was chosen.
On the 22nd of May James went to the house of lords in great state to open parliament. He took his scat on the throne with the crown on his head, and his queen, and Anne, his daughter, princess of Denmark, standing on the right hand of the throne. The Spanish and other catholic ambassadors were present, and heard the pope, the mass, the worship of the Virgin Mary, and the saints all renounced, as the lords took their oaths. James then produced a written speech and read it. He repeated in it what he had before declared to the council, that he would maintain the constitution and the church as by law established, and added that, "Having given this assurance concerning their religion and property, they might rely on his word." Although it had been the custom to listen to the royal speech in respectful silence, at this declaration the members of both houses broke into loud acclamations, he then informed them that he expected a revenue for life, such as they had voted his late brother. Again the expression of accord was loud and satisfactory, but what followed was not so palatable. '"The inclination men have for frequent parliaments, some may think, would be the best secured by feeding me from time to time by such proportions as they shall think convenient, and this argument, it being the first time I speak to you from the throne, I will answer once for all, that this would be a very improper method to take with me; and that the best way to engage me to meet you often is always to use me well. I expect, therefore, that you will comply with me in what I have desired, and that you will do it speedily." This agreeable assurance he followed up by announcing a rebellion to have broken out in Scotland under Argyll and other refugees from Holland.
When the commons returned to their own house, lord Preston entered into a high eulogium of the king, telling the house that his name spread terror over all Europe, and that the reputation of England was already beginning to rise under his rule; they had only to have full confidence in him as a prince who had never broken his word, and thus enable him to assert the dignity of England. The house wont into a committee of supply, and voted his majesty the same revenue that Charles had enjoyed, namely, one million two hundred thousand pounds a year for life. But when several petitions against some of the late elections were presented, a serious opposition presented itself in a most unexpected quarter. This was from Sir Edward Seymour, of Berry Pomeroy Castle, the member for Exeter. Seymour was both a tory and a high churchman, proud of his descent from the lord protector Seymour, and who had great influence in the western communities. He was a man of an indifferent moral character, but able and accomplished, and a forcible debater. He was now irritated by the government proceedings in the elections which had interfered with his interests, and he made a fierce attack on the late government pressure on the elections; denounced the removal of the charters, the conduct of the returning officers; declared that there was a design to repeal the test and habeas corpus acts, and moved that no one should vote whose right to sit was disputed, till that right had been ascertained by a searching inquiry. There was no seconder to the motion, and it fell to, the ground; for the whole house, including the whigs, sate, as it were, thunderstruck. But the effect was deep and lasting, and in time did not fail of its end.
For the present, however, things went smoothly enough, and the king informed the house, through Sir Dudley North, the brother of the lord-keeper Guildford, and the same who had been elected sheriff of London by the influence of the late king for his ready and ingenious modes of serving the royal will, that his late brother had left considerable debts, and that the naval and ordnance stores were getting low. The house promptly agreed to lay on new taxes, and North induced them to tax sugar and tobacco, so that the king now had a revenue of one million nine hundred thousand pounds from England, besides his pension from France, and was strong in revenue.
The lords were employed in doing an act of justice, in calling before them the lord Danby, and rescinding the impeachment still hanging over his head, and also summoning to their bar the lords Powis, Arundel, and Bellasis, the victims of the alleged popish plot, and fully discharging them as well as the earl of Tyrone. They also passed a bill reversing the attainder of lord Stafford, who had been executed for treason and concern in the popish plot, now admitting that he had been unjustly sacrificed, through the perjury of Oates. The commons were proceeding to the third reading of this bill, when the rebellion of Monmouth was announced, and the question remained unsettled till the trial of Warren Hastings, more than a century afterwards, when men of all parties declared the Oates' popish plot a pure fiction, and the attainder of Staflbrd was then formally reversed.
The political refugees who had fled to Holland and sought protection from prince William, were numerous, and some of them of considerable distinction. Monmouth and the earl of Argyll were severally looked up to as the heads of the English and Scottish exiles. The famous persecution against the covenanters in Scotland and the whigs in England, had not only swelled these bands of refugees, but rendered them at once ardent for revenge and restoration. Amongst them Ford, lord Grey of Wavk, Fergmon, who had been conspicuous amongst the whig plotters, Wildman and Danvers, of the same party, Ayloffe and Wade, whig lawyers and plotters, Goodenough, formerly sheriff of London, and whom we have seen giving evidence against the papists, Rumbold, the Eye House maltster, and others, were incessantly endeavouring to excite Monmouth to avail himself of his popularity, and the hatred of popery which
