ONE:The Revolution of 1688, which overthrew absolutism in the State, overthrew it also in the Church. The political principles of William of Orange, and the Whigs who brought him in, were not more opposed to the absolutism of the Stuarts than the ecclesiastical principles of the new king and queen, and the prelates whom they introduced into the Church, were to the high-churchism of Laud, Sancroft, Atterbury, and their section of the Establishment. When Parliament, on the accession of William and Mary, presented the Oath of Allegiance to the Lords and Commons, eight of the bishops, including Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused it; and of these, five were of the number of the seven who had refused to sign James II.'s Declaration of Indulgence, and thus gave the immediate occasion to the outbreak ending in the Revolution. Thus a fresh faction was produced in the Establishment, that of the Non-jurors, who were,[142] after much delay and patience, finally excluded from their livings. As the existing law could not touch the non-juring bishops so long as they absented themselves from Parliament, where the oath had to be put to them, a new Act was passed, providing that all who did not take the new oaths before the 1st of August, 1689, should be suspended six months, and at the end of that time, in case of non-compliance, should be ejected from their sees. Still the Act was not rigorously complied with; they were indulged for a year longer, when, continuing obstinate, they were, on the 1st of February, 1691, excluded from their sees. Two of the eight had escaped this sentence by dying in the interimnamely, the Bishops of Worcester and Chichester. The remaining six who were expelled were Sancroft, the Primate, Ken of Bath and Wells, Turner of Ely, Frampton of Gloucester, Lloyd of Norwich, and White of Peterborough. In the room of these were appointed prelates of Whig principles, the celebrated Dr. Tillotson being made Primate. Other vacancies had recently or did soon fall out; so that, within three years of his accession, William had put in sixteen new bishops, and the whole body was thus favourable to his succession, and, more or less, to the new views of Church administration.
THREE:In the East Indies we this year sent over from Madras an army and reduced Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East India settlements, and the island of Java, as well as the small island of Madura, so that the last trace of the Dutch power was extinguished in the East, as it was at home by the domination of Buonaparte. In the West Indies we had already made ourselves masters of all the islands of France, Denmark, and Holland; and our troops there had nothing to do but to watch and keep down the attempts at insurrection which French emissaries continued to stir up in the black populations. We had some trouble of this kind in St. Domingo and in Martinique, where the negroes, both free and slaves, united to massacre the whites, and set up a black republic like that of Hayti. But the French settlers united with the English troops in putting them down, and a body of five hundred blacks, in an attempt to burn down the town of St. Pierre, were dispersed with great loss, and many were taken prisoners, and fifteen of them hanged.There were some circumstances, however, which came out that created considerable suspicion and displeasure in Ireland. Wood had given a bribe to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, to procure him the contract, and the Government had ordered the coinage without paying the Irish Privy Council and Lord-Lieutenant the compliment of consulting them on this occasion. Swift saw these errors, and seized on them for his own purposes. He did not stop to inquire whether, after all, the proposed coinage would not, in any circumstances, be much better than the present distressing scarcity of copper money, and whether the farthings and halfpence might not turn out as good, though they were contracted for. It was enough for him that there was a cause of discontent which he could fan into a flame against the British Government. He threw all his spiteful soul into it, and his "Drapier's Letters" inflamed the public mind to such a degree that Walpole was compelled to cancel the patent.
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